Jessica Baran

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  picks October 23, 2018

  Martha Friedman

  Martha Friedman’s “Castoffs” appears at first to be a vast, sterile grid of white pedestals bearing fragments of archaic figurative sculpture. But descend among them, and one is quickly roused from this initial read. Metal spikes penetrate and dissect anatomical cement casts of arched feet, tensed spines, and clinched shoulders; extremities balance precariously on masses of rubber clotting in viscous chunks; latex tubes in brownish reds and dingy yellows protrude from limbs before looping back like intravenous lines. Intermittently, larger-than-life glass fingers beckon like some perverse siren’s

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  print September 2018

  Amy Sherald

  The subjects of Amy Sherald’s meticulous, nearly life-size oil portraits confront the viewer with ambiguous expressions that are neither joyful nor melancholic. Their impassive gazes suggest interiorized contemplation and recognition of being seen. This intimate, seven-piece retrospective of her output from the past three years focused on works depicting one or two subjects standing against a flat monochromatic field, cutting bold totemic silhouettes out of bright voids. The outlier—also one of the more recent pieces, debuting in this show—situates a pair of women holding hands against the low

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  picks July 19, 2013

  Lari Pittman

  Through a mere twenty-four works of immodest scale, curator Kelly Shindler draws a nuanced, retroactive arc connecting Lari Pittman’s recent painterly tendencies to select pieces (dating, at the earliest, to the mid-1980s) that presage his current approach. Taking its title from Pittman’s 1993 painting Untitled #17 (A Decorated Chronology of Insistence and Resignation), this exhibition—the artist’s first museum retrospective in some twenty years—foregrounds Pittman’s use of a marginalized style (decoration) as an analogy for a marginalized identity (queer) and medium (painting in the ’70s).