picks April 26, 2022

Lukas Quietzsch

Caution is the care we take to avoid the worst fates. Stand at the end of any subway platform and behold: two yellow lines stretch out into the distance, demarcating the edges between safety and certain death. Warnings without language are visual manifestations of the danger itself, such as the inexplicable shadow that presaged Father Brennan’s demise in The Omen (1976), or the photographs of Alaska’s vanishing McCall Glacier on the Environmental Protection Agency’s Climate Change Indicators website. Lukas Quietzsch’s first exhibition in New York, aptly titled “Parallel Warnings in Simple

picks November 23, 2021

Rebecca Shore

A double take is a delayed reaction to an unexpected or significant situation after an initial failure to notice anything out of the ordinary. This moment of surprise underscores Chicago artist Rebecca Shore’s New York solo debut. Upon first inspection, the five paintings on view appear mechanically designed and bilaterally symmetrical. The press release warns of “symmetry being violated” and “patterns subtly breaking down.” Yet when one notices the first blip in these imperfect systems, one is in for a bit of a shock—kind of like when you initially discover that your eyes are actually two

print September 2020

Rebecca Morris

For more than twenty-five years, Rebecca Morris has been constructing a visual language that can be read as obtuse yet direct, historical and personal, abstract but also unabashedly literal. Her syntax is composed of a sparse but growing number of motifs that recur within a seemingly infinite number of inflections. Shapes get slurred. Squares become round. Edges bleed. Patterns are executed with reckless imprecision. Grids feel like fishing nets, unyielding but malleable. Lines function as cartographic divisions, tentative embraces, or cartoon snakes—sometimes all at once. In this most recent

picks March 12, 2020

Tom Waring

Currently occupying Downs & Ross are ten candy-colored oil paintings by the British-born artist Tom Waring. His first show with the gallery serves up endless facility and art-historical influences, from the Renaissance and proto-Surrealism to the beginnings of Op art and well beyond. The press release insists that this presentation isn’t merely a game of I Spy by contextualizing it with two quotes. The first one is from a 2017 essay by the art historian Luciana Parisi that defines “post-truth politics,” while the other is taken out of Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron, a collection of stories

picks February 04, 2020

David Reed

I didn’t notice it at first: a stark-white, totally alien non-brushstroke on a black ground that practically looks like a sticker adhered to the upper half of #710, 2005–2009/2018–19, one of the fifteen canvases in David Reed’s latest exhibition. I say “non-brushstroke” because this thing is anything but painterly; in fact, its speed is so out of rhythm in this composition that it’s practically an anachronism within the field of swooping marks beneath it. (Perhaps it was executed after the almost decade-long pause in the work’s process.) Yet, due to the frame’s towering proportions, you hardly

picks October 28, 2019

Ron Gorchov

In 1966, Ron Gorchov decided to ditch the woefully rectilinear confines of painting’s traditional support in favor of something more curvaceous. A year later he came upon the ideal form, one that would become his signature—the “saddle.” Geometrically speaking, these saddles are hyperbolic paraboloids, a kind of conoid used frequently in architecture for its stability or, alternatively, in the design of Pringles potato chips for their stackability. (Coincidentally, this quintessential American snack food hit shelves the same year Gorchov began working with this unique structure. The mind wanders.

Julia Ribeiro