picks March 28, 2020

Ana Mendieta

This intimate exhibition of Ana Mendieta’s work, curated by Cuban compatriot Wilfredo Prieto on the thirty-fifth anniversary of the artist’s death, revolves around three short films that intertwine absence with presence. Perhaps the most distinctive of the three, X-Ray, ca. 1975, records the artist’s X-radiated skull, her jaw moving up and down to rehearse a speech test. The work’s clinical imagery contrasts with the closeness of Mendieta’s voice, here somewhat childlike. Flower Person, Flower Body, made the same year, deepens the idea of understanding the body through its lack. If in X-Ray we

print March 2020

Ludovica Carbotta

Fortresses are generally designed to protect against external threats. A less common (though perhaps more poetic) reason to build a fort is to confine something dangerous within it, protecting those outside. This was the purpose of the gunpowder storehouse at Forte Marghera, a nineteenth-century fortification on the Venice Lagoon that is now an art space. Known as the Austrian Polveriera, this building last year, in the context of the 2019 Venice Biennale, housed the works from Ludovica Carbotta’s ongoing series “Monowe,” 2016–, that were reconfigured (along with drawings for other sculptures

picks January 03, 2020

Ana Laura Aláez

By no means chronologically rigorous, this retrospective skips entire periods and sutures together assorted bodies of work. But its heterodoxy is useful to understanding the artistic obsessions of Ana Laura Aláez, as well as the puckish tensions between her “emotional architecture” and the New Basque sculpture. See, for instance, Culito (Bottom, 1996–2008), a smooth iron butt plugged with a cork. Tigras y felinas (Tigresses and Felines, 1995) consists of two shamanic columns of suspended skirts, undergarments, and kilts that get at Alaéz’s interest in how fashion shapes identity through concealment

picks October 07, 2019

Jacobo Castellano

Over the past couple of years, sculptor Jacobo Castellano has made a compelling motif out of the torno, an enclosed revolving door or window found in Spanish and Latin American cloistered convents that is used to transfer goods, missives, and people through the sacred and profane realms. Based on the idea of this bygone contraption, which is as much a threshold between public and private as between secular and holy, Castellano has built a static and corpulent piece that appears to float on a carved wooden base with golden reflections at the bottom edge. From TORNO, 2019, hang worn tapestries in

picks June 04, 2019

Ulrich Rückriem

With its eight sculptures and two series on paper, “The Last Fifty Years, 1968 / 2019” demonstrates the archetypes that have run through Ulrich Rückriem’s oeuvre with assured concision and a poise at once mysterious and upfront. The oldest of the pieces—all of which have been remade for the exhibition—is the iconic dolomite Column, 1968/2019, a rectangular prism sawed in half and then wedged together. This early work sprang from the artist’s experience as a quarrier for the reconstruction of the Cologne Cathedral. With its simple but resolute gesture, great concern for process, warm rather than

picks December 14, 2018

José Díaz

In his previous exhibitions, José Díaz’s main inspirations were the night and the city. This was because while he was painting, he moonlighted as a bartender at night. The city appeared in his work as a series of automated roads that spanned the canvases. Now, in “La mañana,” Díaz repositions the theme around awakening: His new large-scale abstractions, all from 2018, are composed and hued groggily, their associations drifting toward bleary eyes, the scrape of a toothbrush against teeth, a half-remembered dream.

In this show, Díaz has enriched his palette with blues and grays as well as widened

picks October 12, 2018

Alfredo Rodríguez

With “Body Building,” Alfredo Rodríguez continues his long-standing photographic exploration of the human form. This exhibition contains two types of work. First, torn photographs of what look like limbs, muscles, and joints are adhered to panels of wood and coated in a highly protective, hard matte resin to create large-scale collages. The delicate, crystal-like reflective surfaces from previous exhibitions, such as “Limbo” (2016), are nowhere to be found here. Instead, one observes the artist’s investigation into how fragile materials such as paper and processes such as silver gelatin can be

picks July 11, 2018

Beatriz González

Anyone who happened to have heard the story behind the series “Los suicidas del Sisga” (The Sisga Suicides), 1965, would have been intrigued: Two young religious fanatics in love drowned themselves in the Sisga Dam to keep from falling into sins of the flesh. It’s telling that, ignoring the event, what struck Beatriz González was the clumsiness of newspapers’ reproduction of the couple’s image—the excessive and grainy flatness of their smiling faces, the overall lack of detail.

This curiosity toward mass-produced images—their aesthetics, their political and affective clout—unites the strategies

picks April 19, 2018

Vítor Mejuto

For centuries, the education of painters revolved around scrutinizing masterpieces in order to grasp how their makers resolved problems of a purely technical nature. No one looks at painting as mercilessly, and with as little sense of metaphor, as a painter. In “Pintor en la corte,” (Painter in the Court), Vítor Mejuto revisits Diego Velázquez, Antonello da Messina, Jaime Serra, Francisco Goya, and Titian, among others. Mejuto’s small-format paintings are concise and honed, to say nothing of elegant, reproductions of the geometric aspects of some of those masters’ works.

Despite its schematic

Joaquín Jesús Sánchez