Jonah Goldman Kay

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  picks November 10, 2022

  Joanna Piotrowska & Formafantasma

  In 2015, Joanna Piotrowska was photographing in Nagorno-Karabakh, a disputed territory within Azerbaijan, when she was apprehended by local police. Accused of spying for Russia, Piotrowska was subjected to intensive questioning that culminated in her interrogators’ demand that she continue her work to prove her innocence. Faced with the prospect of perpetual surveillance, Piotrowska turned her attention to roses, “the only safe subject,” as she’d later explain. In one print, part of the expansive installation Sub Rosa, 2022, a hand delicately cups a dark rose, a slightly stiff yet gentle gesture

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  print November 2022

  Biennale Matter of Art

  In “Disease as an Aesthetic Project,” Alina Popa’s final essay before her untimely death in 2019, the Romanian artist reflects on her experience of terminal illness. Where many would steel themselves against the pains of sickness, Popa leaned into her vulnerability and the contradictions of her condition. “I despair. I refuse to live in fear. I want the thing to disappear, to stop harassing me. I have no break from it. I have no break from me,” she writes. The second edition of Biennale Matter of Art similarly centered on a desire to nourish vulnerability amid violence. Organized by transit.cz,

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  print September 2022

  Kutluğ Ataman

  The works of Kutluğ Ataman blur the line between fact and fiction as the Turkish artist-filmmaker examines his subjects’ self-presentation. Ataman’s own experience flickers at the edges, always present but never the main subject. In the pair of exhibitions “Mesopotamian Dramaturgies” and “fiction”—Ataman’s first gallery shows since stepping away from the art scene in 2013—biography once again held an understatedly central place. In the early aughts, Ataman was a rising star in the art world, with a Turner Prize nomination and a Venice Biennale commission to his name. Then he suddenly withdrew

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  picks June 28, 2022

  Kira Freije

  The end is nigh for Kira Freije’s metal sculptures. The pair of figures in fireworks (all works cited, 2022) seems to have taken the news well: One drapes a comforting hand on the other’s back as they stare out the window, complacent in each other’s company. Or maybe, as the work’s title suggests, they’re just enjoying the pyrotechnics together. In permanence of a sacred tongue, a stainless steel and cast aluminum figure of a woman bends down on one knee, her mouth agape and her hands clasped in prayer. Is she hoping for salvation in her final moments or simply lost in venerative ecstasy?

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  picks June 21, 2022

  “Post-Digital Intimacy”

  The exhibition “Post-Digital Intimacies” brings together a selection of artists who examine the relationship between intimacy and technology. All of the works in the exhibition were produced in the past half-decade and react—sometimes directly but more often indirectly—to the place of the self in a depersonalized landscape. Sculpture figures prominently here, foregrounding the materiality of the body and the fragmentation of its constituent parts as a means of reconstructing intimacy. Through her biomorphic objects, Ivana Bašić approximates bodies unable to function without metal prostheses. In

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  picks June 20, 2022

  Robert Nava

  Robert Nava’s large-scale figurative paintings offer sprawling odes to the fantasies of a certain class of preteen Dungeons & Dragons enthusiast. Mythical beasts, angels, and demons are rendered in thick, bright brushstrokes and frantic scratches of grease pencil. Nava’s works often have nostalgic titles like Aware Wolf Deity, 2022, quoting the dad-joke-level pun of a recent meme, or Artax Gate (Before) and (After), 2022, a nod to the 1984 film The NeverEnding Story. If Jason Rhoades probed the inner machinations of postindustrial American masculinity, Nava has mined the consciousness of the

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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