print October/November 2020

Jane and Louise Wilson

Artists and identical twin sisters Jane and Louise Wilson, whose collaborative career spans more than thirty years, possess a seemingly insatiable appetite for all manner of psychic, social, and environmental catastrophes. Their remarkable Stasi City, 1997, a four-channel installation filmed inside the abandoned former headquarters of the East German secret police in Berlin, is a powerful evocation of the lingering toxicity associated with state-sponsored terror. In Face Scripting: What Did the Building See?, 2011, a collaborative effort between the sisters, the research group Forensic Architecture,

print September 2020

Peter Nagy

As an artist and a cofounder of legendary East Village gallery Nature Morte, Peter Nagy launched his storied career amid the combative, hyperintellectual atmosphere of 1980s postmodernity. This retrospective survey of works produced between 1982 and 1992, all rendered in black and white, constituted a richly nuanced time capsule of a paradigm-shifting period.

To revisit work predicated on cultural critique several decades after its production is to submit it to quite an acid test. How amazing to discover that Nagy’s early output, which shows the artist’s penchant for mapping transformations

print July/August 2020

Gary Simmons

Honey’s back for a return engagement in Gary Simmons’s new paintings, this time with her boyfriend, Bosko; both characters hail from the Looney Tunes animated cartoons that captivated audiences in the 1930s. As stereotypical caricatures of black people, Bosko and Honey, who were neither fully human nor entirely animal, starred in more than twenty musical-film shorts as singing, dancing simpletons who were as happy as they were oblivious to the debased racism they emblematized. Directly related to the minstrel stage, they were second only to Porky Pig and Daffy Duck in popularity. Even when

print May/June 2020

Mary Lovelace O’Neal

Though the seventy-eight-year-old Mary Lovelace O’Neal’s art and achievements warrant great acclaim, she is, unfortunately, little known. It’s no small wonder: O’Neal is a black woman based on the West Coast. She was not celebrated in the much touted “Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power,” which originated at London’s Tate Modern in 2017 and traveled around the world. “Chasing Down the Image,” a mini retrospective covering five decades of her paintings at Mnuchin Gallery—O’Neal’s first show in New York since 1993—aimed to remedy that omission.

Hailing from Jackson, Mississippi, O’Neal

print April 2020

William Cordova

William Cordova is a storyteller—a recuperator of ancestral memories. The artist invites us to question how we might revisit belief systems that vanished eons ago. Themes that animate his installations, objects, and collages are intoned in the material dimensions of his work, along with undulating titles that refer to sound, occult secrets, warriors, ghosts, ancient architectures, folkloric music, textiles, and the landscape of Peru.

Aspects of his own life factor significantly in his efforts to ameliorate the conditions of displacement and erasure—he was born in Lima, taken at an early age to

print January 2020

Öyvind Fahlström

Öyvind Fahlström (1928–1976) figures prominently in the unwritten histories of Pop and Conceptual art. Relegated to the margins of these major movements, he remains a footnote, which is curious given how deftly he juggled institutional critique with game theory, comics with front-page news. An exhibition of key works at Venus Over Manhattan begged the question: How does a significant and prolific artist get shunted to the sidelines? In Fahlström’s case that dismissal had everything to do with how truly radical he was. He belonged everywhere and nowhere at once: Brought up in both Brazil and

print November 2019

Teresa Burga

Teresa Burga, who is based in Lima, Peru, has been making art for more than fifty years. Yet it was hardly evident in the drawings and sculptures that comprised this, her first gallery show in the US, where she is barely known. Youthful energy was showcased in several series of densely rendered mixed-media works on paper featuring, variously, cute girls in folkloric fashions (“Niñas peruanas Cusqueñas”[Peruvian Girls from Cusco], 2019), and the flamboyant figures of the Carnival of Venice that pop in and out of patterned backdrops (“Acqua Alta” [High Water], 2019–). The drawings might have been

previews January 2010

Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams

The conceptual currents within Renée Green’s twenty-year practice gain force from the cyclical return to prior installations, as each reconfiguration condenses a multitude of ambient identities grounded in global histories, feminism, identity politics, and fiction.

The conceptual currents within Renée Green’s twenty-year practice gain force from the cyclical return to prior installations, as each reconfiguration condenses a multitude of ambient identities grounded in global histories, feminism, identity politics, and fiction. One of the two recent projects that make up this show, Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009, commissioned for the National Maritime Museum in London, blends meditations on oceans and memories, uncertainties and desires, in film and sound works, banners, diagrams, and drawings. Also on view is United Space

previews September 2008

Lutz Bacher

Shifting stylistic strategies underwrite her critical engagement with politics and contribute to a sense of interruption—we always only have partial views of her chameleon practice. This exhibition aims to emend that with a site-specific installation of ten new works, as well as a rotating display of older pieces.

Women artists of the ’70s—the topic is white-hot. Suddenly everyone is receptive. Many once-neglected female artists who emerged in that decade are now beginning to receive wider recognition and even, as in the case of Lutz Bacher, their first-ever solo exhibitions in major museums. Working in California in the mid-’70s and in New York (in affiliation with Pat Hearn Gallery) in the ’80s and ’90s, the intentionally elusive Bacher has long enjoyed a “cult” following. Her work resists easy categorization—she is not strictly a photographer, installation artist, videographer,

print April 2008

“Archive Fever: Uses of the Document in Contemporary Art”

“Decision 2008” is shaping up as a campaign during which, collectively speaking, we are looking for equal parts inspiration and transformation. The sense of “history in the making” is palpable, the race also being played up in the media as an infinity of meaningful moments, ranging from the cataclysmic to the cozy, that may be used to sell a candidate or lobby for a cause. These days, it seems, everybody has a hand in history. When a culture suffers from short-term memory in this way, archives are vital testaments to times past, repositories stuffed with documents, photographs, films, records

print January 2008

Hirsch Perlman

Hirsch Perlman exhibits regularly but infrequently in New York—it’s been six years since he participated in the Whitney Biennial and more than a decade since his last solo show here. These time lapses are sufficient almost to allow us to forget about his practice, an effect that complements the already spare means and demeanor of his art and ratifies his preference for understatement. Perlman’s use of ephemeral materials, simple black-and-white photography, and text dates back to the ’80s and aligns itself with vintage Conceptualism’s promotion of ideas over objects. True to form, he often

print October 2007

Martin Creed

“Feelings,” British artist Martin Creed’s first retrospective in North America, was noisy, chaotic, hyperactive, circuslike, funny, stupid, clever, provocative, elegant, and annoying—none of which qualities jibe with the sensitivity alluded to by the title. Creed’s verbal and visual jokes, far from simply describing physical sensations or emotional states, often mark the distance between historically informed maneuvers and genial allusions to intimate personal experience.

Presented in two concurrent parts (at Bard College’s Center for Curatorial Studies [CCS], along with a two-work Manhattan

Jan Avgikos