Jonah Goldman Kay

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  picks May 14, 2022

  Simon Linke

  Simon Linke is perhaps the only person more concerned with the longevity of this publication than its editors. For nearly four decades, Linke has focused on a single subject: the glossy advertisements for upcoming exhibitions that appear in Artforum’s monthly print edition. His painstakingly accurate reproductions catapulted him to fame as a leading member of the YBA generation. However, Linke’s singular focus belies the nuanced changes his Artforum project has undergone over the past thirty-five years.

  The artist’s current exhibition at Darren Flook, a two-room retrospective of Linke’s greatest

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  picks April 29, 2022

  Davide Balula

  A few weeks ago, a Tumblresque collage of an astronaut riding a horse made the rounds on the internet. Except for a few small glitches—a second hoof on one of the legs and an uncharacteristically bushy tail—there were no visible signs that this picture had been created by the newest version of DALL-E, an artificial-intelligence interface that generates images based on written inputs from users. Amid the excitement over the potential for using natural language processing to produce realistic images, there was an undercurrent of unease about the program’s notional capabilities.

  That trepidation is

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  picks April 13, 2022

  Tim Maul

  Tim Maul’s photographs are hard to contextualize, largely because the artist himself defies categorization. Maul has operated in and around the New York art world since the 1970s, exhibiting alongside its members but never fully embedding himself in the city’s social milieu. It’s perhaps for that reason, or owing to his fastidious avoidance of branding, that Maul never grounded his practice in New York like other members of his generation. In the 1980s, he ventured to Italy, then, a decade later, to Ireland, floating in and out of Manhattan along the way.

  This sense of placelessness permeates

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  picks March 18, 2022

  Vlatka Horvat

  Covid has spurred a prolonged reevaluation of the way we interact with our surroundings, with the virus’s rapid mutation prompting a near-daily restructuring of our engagement with public space. In “By Hand, on Foot,” Vlatka Horvat examines the pandemic-induced precarity of the relationship among the body, the objects it encounters, and the environments it inhabits. The exhibition centers on To See Stars over Mountains, 2021, an ambitious fleet of 365 works on paper, each of which documents a single day in 2021. For all of them, Horvat first took a photograph on the daily walk permitted during

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  picks December 07, 2021

  Mona Ardeleanu

  In a car crash, a vehicle’s seat belt system constrains the driver’s forward motion, while the airbag absorbs the impact of the body. These safety devices will likely harm the motorist, just not as much as an unprotected collision. This tension—between our inherent fragility and the restraints that both injure and protect our bodies—animates Mona Ardeleanu’s paintings in “The Padding.” Based on a snowboarding accident the artist had in her teens, the canvases depict supple forms constrained by straps, ropes, and other tools of securement. Rendered with an ultrarealistic attention to detail,

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  interviews June 12, 2020

  Alicja Kwade

  Guided by scientific principles, Alicja Kwade breaks complex structures into comprehensible segments while shrouding her art in a mystery both cosmic and human. Last spring, she installed two large-scale sculptures modeling the solar system on top of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art for its Roof Garden Commission series. Comprised of heavy, delicately suspended stones from around the world, the abstract orrery encouraged viewers to reflect on their own position within a massive yet fragile universe. Working under partial lockdown in Berlin, the artist discusses the nature of time under

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  picks March 24, 2020

  Basma Alsharif

  Basma Alsharif’s exhibition here centers around A Philistine (2019), a novella written by the artist that tracks a train journey down the historic Haifa–Beirut–Tripoli line that moves backwards through history at each stop. In the middle of the main gallery, a public reading space offers visitors the opportunity to situate themselves within this narrative of transience. A Philistine includes historic images of pre-1948 Palestine taken from the Library of Congress; these are also displayed on the walls surrounding the miniature library. Alsharif, herself a member of the Palestinian diaspora, has

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  interviews February 07, 2020

  Eva Koťátková

  Eva Koťátková is known for investigating societal rules and authoritarian codes via large-scale installations and collaborative workshops. While her earlier work centered on limiting performers’ physical movement with metal cages and apparatuses—bleak exercises in regimentation inspired in part by her upbringing in the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic—Koťátková has begun to use textiles to reenvision how the body can function within oppressive systems. As two solo exhibitions end their run—“In the Body of a Fish Out of Water” at Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover and “Confessions of the Piping System”

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  picks November 26, 2019

  Olivia Mihălțianu

  Vines of found film hang from the walls of a nineteenth-century house in Bucharest, transforming its rooms into a jungle of negatives. The installation is part of Romanian artist Olivia Mihălțianu’s new exhibition, which she conceived of during a residency at Frac des Pays de la Loire in Carquefou. Wandering through the institution’s gardens, Mihălțianu became entranced by the relationship between plant grafting and film cutting. She began to document these conjoined processes, her work displayed here side-by-side as a two-channel video and in a series of photographs of the garden’s grafted