Julian Elias Bronner

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  interviews December 05, 2014

  Heinz Mack

  Heinz Mack is an artist who primarily works with light and is a cofounder of the international artists’ network ZERO. Mack speaks here about the so-called Sahara Project, a series of installations he made in the Tunisian desert from 1962 to 1976. The project is featured in the exhibition “ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s,” at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, until January 7, 2015. Mack’s concurrent solo exhibition, “From ZERO to Today: Heinz Mack, 1955–2014,” also runs at New York’s Sperone Westwater Gallery until December 13, 2014.

  WHEN I WAS IN NEW YORK IN 1963, I was searching for new

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  picks November 23, 2014

  Gabriele Beveridge

  It’s said that it takes two decades for cultural nostalgia to solidify; after this time, past trends can revive as ironic countercurrents to the present fashions. In “Gold Diamond Park,” Gabriele Beveridge’s debut solo exhibition in New York, the artist juxtaposes sculptural elements to self-consciously question the criteria for trading and exhibiting ideals of beauty. Her work simultaneously evaluates the processes by which aesthetics fade out and return as cultural currency.

  Exemplary is a series of seven tableaux of perforated metal panels that the artist took from the ceiling of a library in

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  picks November 07, 2014

  Claudio Parmiggiani

  A severe silence sets the tone for Claudio Parmiggiani’s first solo exhibition in the United States in three decades: In Untitled, 2014, a sixteenth-century ecclesiastical bronze bell, is gagged and gibbeted by its tongue above the entryway to this gallery—a portent that announces a puissant presentation of Parmiggiani’s oeuvre. And yet it tolls for no one. In the next room, a three-dimensional iron stake pierces an untitled photographic print of the artist’s palm—a self-inflicted stigmata that undermines the artist’s own authorial taction. Transversely installed is Che mangia questo pane vivrà

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  picks September 08, 2014

  Anita Molinero

  Since the 1980s, French sculptor Anita Molinero has worked almost exclusively with domestic and often toxic materials, cauterizing, deforming, and smelting chemically fabricated, factory-produced objects. Her current solo exhibition, “Oreo,” appraises the material and conceptual consistency of manufactured products intended to control circulation––traffic signs, road barriers, speed bumps, various packaging materials, etc.––as well as their status as industrially made, environmentally hazardous commodities designed for the public domain.

  Take, for example, an untitled series of five large-scale,

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  picks June 09, 2014

  Edith Dekyndt

  Belgian artist Edith Dekyndt marvels at physical phenomena, often going beyond the banal limits of matter to tap into its thaumaturgical potential. In 2004, in an icy alpine region, she experimented with the triboelectric effects of a woolen cover, fascinated by the discharges from its material during the reaction. Exactly ten years later, with ritualistic rehearsal and scientific exactitude, the artist recreated the procedure in an area of the Arctic Circle, the Norwegian Svalbard Archipelago. Her solo exhibition, “Chronology of Tears,” addresses these two iterations.

  An image displaying streaks

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  diary May 29, 2014

  Pro Choice

  “WAIT—there’s a gallery weekend in Paris?” Marian Goodman’s Nicolas Nahab seemed surprised when I mentioned last Friday’s events. Around us, thirty others wined and dined under a heated tent on the rooftop of Le Perchoir, views of Montmartre and the white dome of the Sacré Cœur offering a dazzling backdrop.

  Somewhere down in the City of Lights, Kim Kardashian and her maids of “honor” trampled through town for her bachelorette bacchanal, but up here the festivities revolved around Colombian artist Oscar Murillo, who was opening his first solo exhibition in France at Marian Goodman Gallery, the

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  picks May 13, 2014

  Delphine Deguislage

  Several stimuli spring to mind––some somatic, others synthetic––when one swallows Delphine Deguislage’s current solo exhibition, “My Dopamine’s Been Busy.” And it begins with a hit: In Mineral Sex (all works 2014), a poster displayed at the entrance, a masturbating woman is made more modest by a superimposed layer of spliced harlequin pattern made from images of microscopic mineral compositions. More oblique still is another, nearby poster, which shares the show’s name. Here, an image of an ancient ring engraved with cuneiform––its archaic provenance marked by a petrous, timeworn surface––is

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  diary May 06, 2014

  Kiss and Make-up

  THOSE NEW TO THE ART-WORLD CIRCUIT quickly realize that to see is to know: When it comes to objects and the people that travel worldwide to view them, a sense of familiarity arrives from recognizing the same names and faces around the globe. Introductions, handshakes, and the international two-cheek kiss are most often merely phatic formalities. This is especially true in a city like Brussels, where you see the people you know often and can easily point out those you don’t, urging people to get acquainted and fast. Perhaps that’s the reason the one-cheek kiss is customary for the Bruxellois:

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  interviews March 17, 2014

  Katrín Sigurðardóttir

  Katrín Sigurðardóttir’s site-specific installations often address collective memory and architecture. For the Icelandic Pavilion at the Fifty-Fifth Venice Biennale, Sigurðardóttir debuted Foundation, 2013, a raised, decorative floor inserted into the former laundry of an eighteenth-century palazzo. The work is currently on view in her solo exhibition at the Reykjavik Art Museum until April 13, 2014, and will travel to New York’s SculptureCenter. She discusses the piece below.

  BY CONVENTIONAL LOGIC, you could say that floors don’t move. We think of the ground underneath our feet as the parameter

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  picks March 06, 2014

  “La Bella Figura”

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  diary February 03, 2014

  Fair Exchange

  “I WAS WARNED not to dress too extravagantly!” cried a Parisienne collector sporting a bejeweled, Persian-green dress and floral-print overcoat. A black Mercedes pulled up to drive us the mere one hundred yards from the parking lot to Brussels’s Tour & Taxis building for last Wednesday’s opening gala dinner for BRAFA. Until recently, those letters had stood for “Brussels Antique & Fine Art Fair,” but this year it’s been updated to the more modish “Brussels Art Fair,” signifying that the organization has “also embraced modern and contemporary art” and “resolutely secured their position in the

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  picks January 03, 2014

  Philipp Fürhofer

  “On/off relations,” Philipp Fürhofer’s debut solo exhibition at this gallery, consists of eleven translucent Perspex boxes of varying dimensions, which the artist treats as supports for paint and as vitrines for displaying various objects. Resembling Minimalist sculptures turned neo-expressionist chimera, these cubic gestalts are wroth with the fracas of uneven drips and strata of paint. Some boxes are fitted with mirrors and items that are lit from behind, their silhouettes turning each painting into a platonic microverse of visual possibilities. Freischutz, 224 Watt (all works 2013), for