Julia Langbein

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  picks October 02, 2015

  John Riddy and James Castle

  In the abstract, it seems merely provocative to pair John Riddy’s recent photographs of South Africa’s Cape Peninsula with drawings by the self-taught American artist James Castle. Riddy is a British photographer of exquisite technical precision, while Castle, deaf and illiterate, worked in almost complete obscurity until his death in 1977, turning found materials such as packing boxes and kitchen twine into sculpture, books, and drawings.

  Castle has been the subject of two major retrospectives since 2008, both of which struggled with the influence of his biography on the reading of his work.

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  interviews October 15, 2014

  Irma Blank

  Irma Blank was born in Germany in 1934 and has lived in Italy since the 1960s. Her latest exhibition, “Irma Blank: To Be,” is a concise retrospective of her major works—from her earliest script-like transmissions in the Eigenschriften (Self Writings), ca. 1965–72, to the most recent hand-drawn chain-mail of fragmented letters in the pencil on paper Global Writings, ca. 2000–14. The show is on view at London’s Alison Jacques Gallery from October 17 to November 15, 2014.

  THE WORD is deceptive. Since the literary critiques of the 1960s, faith in the word has been largely lost. We see it still today:

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  picks August 01, 2014

  Yvonne Rainer

  Curator Catherine Wood takes Yvonne Rainer’s 1966 observation that “Dance is hard to see” as a point of departure in this exhibition, making the polymath’s groundbreaking choreography from 1961 to 1972 visible in a variety of media. Four times daily, dancers who were trained for this occasion by Rainer and her longtime collaborator Pat Catterson file into the heart of the gallery and perform a forty-five-minute program consisting of four of Rainer’s key pieces from the 1960s. These include Trio A, 1966, the most oft-cited piece to emerge from Rainer’s early experiments with neutral, nonexpressive,

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  picks July 21, 2014

  “Progress”

  The eight-plate engraved series of William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, published in 1735 and currently on view at the Foundling Museum, tells the story of Tom Rakewell, a merchant’s son who arrives in London to remake himself as an aristocrat but whose vanity and profligacy land him in debtor’s prison and the madhouse.

  “Progress” brings together responses to Hogarth’s series produced between 1961 and 2014 by four artists, three of whom—David Hockney, Grayson Perry, and Yinka Shonibare—enjoy near-Hogarthian status in Britain. (The museum also commissioned a set of drawings for the

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  picks July 07, 2014

  “A. R. Hopwood: False Memory Archive”

  This installation of “A. R. Hopwood: False Memory Archive” at two sites—the Carroll/Fletcher Project Space and the Freud Museum—is the most recent event in artist Alasdair Hopwood’s ongoing exploration of the malleability of memory. Hopwood has been particularly interested in the research of psychologist Elizabeth Loftus, who since the 1970s has conducted experiments showing that with narrative prompting, subjects will testify to memories of events that never occurred.

  In the hands of A. R. Hopwood—Alasdair Hopwood’s alter ego, a dry mischief-maker who operates via faxed contracts—the unreliability

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  picks May 22, 2014

  “Everything falls faster than an anvil”

  In this group of twenty-three works (all but five of which were created in the last five years), cartoon means more than Pop art’s now long-canonized repertoire of damsels and soup cans. Take, for instance, Catharine Ahearn’s Empire of Women, 2014, which looks from a distance like a polished abstraction, with a single and highly reflective rectangular pane of dark, blue-black Plexiglas. When viewed at closer proximity, it reveals a second layer: a pulp sci-fi scene in bright gouache and spray paint on rough linen showing a blonde heroine zapping her male combatant in the gut with a futuristic

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  picks April 07, 2014

  Dieter Roth and Arnulf Rainer

  Dieter Roth, Swiss-born but peripatetic, and Vienna-based Arnulf Rainer collaborated on the eighty-plus works on paper on view for over a decade beginning in 1972— sometimes during brief visits, sometimes via the post. In 2 Wrestlers, 1978, a few quick swipes of gray gouache on a nine-by-twelve-inch board obscure a background drawing in black crayon that just barely suggests a frenetic stick figure. Typical of the works in this show, the two wrestlers—if one can read such figures in these superimposed bursts of mark-making—resist interpretation as two heroic artists in a pitched battle: The

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  picks February 20, 2014

  Stephen Willats

  Stephen Willats produced the work in his latest exhibition over just seven years, between 1962 (when he was nineteen) and 1969. During this time, Willats wanted to rediscover art’s social role and mistrusted modernism’s self-referentiality, but these forty-five works on paper—pencil armatures flooded with bright gouache and oils—have a striking visual language unusual for an artist primarily known as a Conceptualist. Most, like the two gum-pink conjoined polygons that encase the irregularly spaced, multicolored rectangles in Architectural Exercise in Color and Form No. 3, 1962, seem like exuberant

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  picks January 31, 2014

  “Matter & Memory”

  Though the exhibition takes its title from a text by Henri Bergson, in the gallery one is also apt to think of E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. The show brings together work by seven artists of disparate origins, among them Czechoslovakia, the United States, Brazil, and Germany. In White’s story, the usually unobserved web transforms into a floating sign of a mysterious, laboring consciousness. In “Matter & Memory,” humble materials such as twine, plaster, and paper, through various transformations, become articulate, witty, or deceptive witnesses of human experience. Spiders seem to have been at

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  picks June 07, 2013

  William Pope.L

  The day that “Forlesen” opened, the shiny black helium balloons of Ellipsis (all works 2013) bobbed in the rafters, moored to washers. A few weeks later, they had sunk to the ground and the worst of them looked like rotten grapes, molding with static dander. “Forlesen” rewards repeat viewings: William Pope.L’s riddle-like assortment of objects inhabits the space differently as the show ages. For instance, Curtain is composed of a pressboard wall facing the entrance and is covered in an orange-brown ketchup compound, buckling and cracking as it festers. Its acid waft, like some mysterious breath,

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  picks October 07, 2012

  “Afterimage”

  It is a testament to the generative richness of the Chicago Imagists, who coalesced around the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hyde Park Art Center in the 1960s, that a show about their influence on artists working today is so void of anxiety and full of exuberance. In a small separate gallery at the museum’s entrance, a concise sample of fourteen Imagist prints, drawings, and paintings by James Nutt, Christina Ramberg, and Ed Paschke, among others from the 1960s and ’70s, reminds viewers of the original movement’s loosely associated idiosyncrasies: figural forms, often with a combination of

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  picks May 15, 2012

  Sreshta Rit Premnath and Matthew Metzger

  A property developer in Bangalore named M. S. Ramaiah purportedly believed that he could stave off death with endless site construction, a conceit that, along with the figure of Ramaiah himself, haunts Sreshta Rit Premnath’s solo exhibition “The Last Image.” The silhouette of a bronze bust of the magnate undergoes a layered process of construction and destruction in a series of three-and-a-half-by-four-foot C-prints on view, also titled “The Last Image.” The Last Image #4, 2012, is a photograph of a photographic print into which the contours of the bust have been slashed, revealing slivers of