Jeppe Ugelvig

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  picks November 30, 2022

  Nobuyoshi Araki and Daido Moriyama

  “Polaroid?” mused Roland Barthes within a pair of brackets in his 1981 book Camera Lucida, “Fun, but disappointing, except when a great photographer is involved.” By the time the French theorist wrote this treatise, the Polaroid had become quite fashionable, a situation that produced some tension among photography’s leading theorists and artistic authorities. Yet in spite of its decline in popularity over the decades (and even after the company declared bankruptcy twice during the early 2000s), the Polaroid has enjoyed a surprising revival of late, both as digital simulacra (via smartphone photo

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  print October 2022

  Reina Sugihara

  Reina Sugihara’s solemn paintings emerge from a structured process of experimentation, guided by an instinct to trace the haptic memory of forms. For the works in her recent exhibition “Frame,” she used two sources: a book of anatomical drawings of human bones and an egg-shaped stone. Employing oils of the highest viscosity, Sugihara starts her daily painting sessions by painting on top of the previous day’s efforts, imagining that the wood panel ground is “blank”; as a result, the finished works are closer to diary entries. They oscillate from dreamlike to nightmarish, always with a distinctive,

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  picks June 17, 2022

  Yang Yoo Yun

  Yang Yoo Yun’s exhibition “Face” rather humbly sets out to capture fear as it manifests in economies of light and dark: those moments when angst clouds everything around us, when tears cause our vision to blur, when danger feels like overexposure, a kind of violent brightening. Refusing the soothing effects of full motifs, the artist revels instead in crushed distances and claustrophobic close-ups. Occasionally, she draws her subjects from cinema history, as in Dogear, 2022, a painting of a printout of a still from the 1991 film Silence of the Lambs in which Jodie Foster’s distinctive mien seems

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  picks June 15, 2022

  Ram Han

  Ram Han’s first solo exhibition in a gallery context confirms the self-reflexiveness and care that have marked her horizontal move from illustration to fine art. A celebrated name in Korea’s entertainment industry—not least thanks to several recent high-profile fashion and K-Pop collaborations—Ram Han’s oversaturated digital imagescapes push viral signifiers of cuteness and femininity to grotesque extremes: flowers bloom sensually from the mouths of starry-eyed JRPG girls, while pink blow-up dolphins ride waves of bodily juices atop a ground of toxic slime. But in the exhibition “Spawning

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  print May 2022

  Tobias Kaspar

  There’s hardly a less satisfying fusion between art and fashion than the “artist estate x luxury fashion brand” product trend we’ve witnessed so often in recent years (Andy Warhol x Calvin Klein, David Wojnarowicz x JW Anderson, and so on). In such conspicuous deals, audiences are left to adorn themselves with expensively licensed TIFF files on cheap cotton sold at hefty prices. To call out the superficiality of this trend is precisely to highlight its inherent relation to surface: Textile is treated as canvas and painting as pattern, now washable at 100 degrees Fahrenheit. 

  In his exhibition “

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  print February 2022

  Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko

  The act of deciphering the sensuous language of retail display is always already nostalgic. Walter Benjamin realized as much when, in the 1930s, he spent years trying to uncover the hidden meanings of the shopping arcades of nineteenth-century Paris. Gabriele Beveridge and Marge Monko study this process with deep sensitivity, each in her own way, and, like Benjamin, without denying its lingering magic of desire. Yet, exactly because of the accord between their aesthetic missions, their works when exhibited together allowed the viewer to be seduced too uncritically by the very surfaces the artists

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  picks November 05, 2021

  Tõnis Vint

  Despite his local reputation as a veritable guru of unofficial art and media in Soviet-occupied Estonia—a reputation that earned him at least seven years under twenty-four-hour surveillance—Tõnis Vint (1942–2019) managed to never get into any direct trouble with the authorities. An artist, theorist, designer, and salon organizer, Vint devoted his life to the dissemination of information derived from a vast range of visual and semiotic systems at a time when the Baltics were mired in a deep and prolonged political aesthetic stasis and exchange with the rest of the world was prohibited almost

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  picks October 08, 2021

  Christopher Aque

  Christopher Aque’s exhibition “A void” centers on Double Negative (Swapping Spit) (all works 2021), an alluring two-part sculptural installation in the form of a working fountain. In both of the identical components, water flows from a milky, kiln-formed glass surface perched atop a black rectangular box that is contained within a larger transparent acrylic basin. Evocative of New York’s many memorial fountains (in particular, Michael Arad’s lacunalike 9/11 Memorial), the liquid feeds from one half of the sculpture into the other, passing by a germicidal UV-C bulb that sanitizes the water,