picks July 18, 2006

Mike Nelson

Invoking his mythical biker gang, the Amnesiacs, to help with his latest installation, British artist Mike Nelson has created a sparse, imposing structure of chicken wire, wood, and plaster. With just one tightly sprung door allowing both entrance to and exit from this flimsy cage, Nelson’s “amnesiac shrine” offers little choice in movement through the space. The transparent structure directs visitors along a spiraling path through a series of passageways and triangular rooms littered with a series of pyres, brittle and charred wood, and five lumpy white plaster globes, each with a gaping hole

picks July 18, 2006

Nayland Blake

In artworks both brutal and tender, Nayland Blake puts his personal relationships, emotions, and anxieties on display, linking his own memories to a range of popular references. Blake’s drawings, sculptures, and manipulated photographs included in this show, titled “The Expulsion from the Garden,” seem like the lonely traces of a tormented nightmare. At times, Blake’s work is present and tactile, as in the enormous swath of plush fake fur slung on an oversize towel rail in Endless Comfort, 2006. Elsewhere, works are distant and enigmatic, as in the film Cruise/Blue, 2006, which combines elements

Table with Curios and Plants (detail), 2006.

picks June 20, 2006

Liz Craft

Acutely aware of the eccentricities of Californian alternative lifestyles, Los Angeles native Liz Craft playfully infuses the tacky implications of bronze figurative sculpture with the quirky charm of flea-market kitsch. In these new works, Craft recalls objects once abandoned in empty lots or dusty junk-shop corners, whimsically embellishing both composition and surface with details that flash back to hippie culture and rock ’n’ roll. For Tire with Bird, 2006, Craft balances material solidity against fanciful superficiality as she softens an encounter between the detritus of an urban wasteland

picks May 31, 2006

Armando Andrade Tudela

Peruvian artist Armando Andrade Tudela unearths a web of multiplicities in an exhibition of photographs, drawings, collages, and one extraordinary architectural proposal, INKA SNOW, 2006. Amid a rugged tabletop landscape reminiscent of the desert surrounding Lima, Tudela presents a model designed to look like three inhabitable lines of cocaine. Next to the massive imprint of a credit card in a white surface that glistens like Andean snow, each “bump” incorporates images of modern chicken farms and the utopian designs of Archigram. Tudela uses the narrative of cocaine’s production—it is

picks May 18, 2006

Larry Bell

Returning to the model of his trademark glass box, Larry Bell's new series of cubes, displayed here in his first solo exhibition in France, reveals the artist's continually evolving attentiveness to the perfection of construction and finish. Flawless pieces of glass are cut into clean squares and fastened together to make uniform cubes with dimensions slightly larger (20 x 20 x 20“) than his classic '60s boxes. Using a vacuum-coating process, Bell has treated the surfaces with Inconel, a metallic alloy that fractures light according to levels of oxidation and density. Shifting from opaque to

picks May 17, 2006

Vidya Gastaldon

As if looking after her children, the soft-yet-sturdy, papier mâché–and-wool body of Swiss artist Vidya Gastaldon’s God-mother (baba), 2006, stands as a proud and peaceful presence on two six-toed feet. Five tetrahedrals, wooden frames wrapped with colored, knitted wool, surround her. Sleeves of dark blue and grey wool clothe the thin wooden beams of Dark Tetrahedral, 2006, while the structural elements of Erotic Tetrahedral, 2006, are wrapped in pink and red. Divine Tetrahedral, 2006—dressed in blue, yellow, and golden orange—refreshes the characteristic symbol for a universal

picks May 08, 2006

Matthieu Laurette

Matthieu Laurette’s first solo show in London focuses on the aesthetics of money. Colourful snapshots and posters from Laurette’s ongoing series of “Déjá vu International Look Alike Conventions” offer refracted images of celebrity and affected images of wealth. Staged in conjunction with some of Laurette’s openings, the gathering of glamorous look-alikes have fooled some art-world attendees and incited frenzied photo-ops. Also aware of how easily money can be overlooked, Laurette’s Slapstick #1 (Money), 2003/2006, uses a hidden camera to document museum visitors obliviously walking past a crumpled

picks April 27, 2006

Jason Glasser

In an authentic expression of frustration with the environmental impact of the United States, American artist Jason Glasser presents a series of drawings and paintings on paper and glass. Identifying a collision between nature and consumer culture, this small, unassuming exhibition presents images of fantastical sea creatures set within landscapes clearly impacted by global warming, pollution, and a hyperactive sport hunting culture. His seductively simple style, which infuses the bland, outdated science textbook illustrations with Raymond Pettibon’s jaded outlook, and his materials, notably

picks April 27, 2006

Andreas Hofer

Andreas Hofer's dominating sculptures, unsettling paintings, and disturbing combinations of found objects draw on deep visual memories. Cowboys, Spiderman, green-headed aliens, Billy the Kid, and Sigmund Freud—emphatically masculine figures of twentieth-century legend—appear on painted carpet, on Styrofoam, and as toys in their original plastic packaging. Each approaching daemon status, these figures direct their attention towards Daemon Nova Dreamer, 2006, a commanding panoramic canvas that is painted with a schematic scene of a winged creature targeted by missiles and is hung

picks April 05, 2006

Carl Andre

Arranged in succession, Carl Andre’s installation Graphite Cube Sum of Numbers, 2006, multiplies across the gallery floor. Eight triangular groupings of dark blocks line the base of an unadorned white wall, each cube’s dimensions precisely (if unintentionally) matching the width of the polished parquet floorboards on which they lay. These cumulative structures demonstrate a simple mathematical progression, with the number of each set’s units rapidly increasing from three to forty-five in concordance with its base’s incremental growth from two to nine (Graphite Cube Sum of Two, 2006, to Graphite

picks March 22, 2006

Andrew Mania & Carl Van Vechten

Quietly enshrined in this dimly lit gallery, Andrew Mania's drawings, paintings, and simple constructions create a stage for the artist's personal collection of photographs by Carl Van Vechten. With the same focus Mania applies to his use of swatches of cotton fabric and vintage ceramic household items, the artist incorporates a series of black-and-white portraits by Van Vechten, an Iowa-born New Yorker who challenged racial segregation while moving among Manhattan's early twentieth-century social and intellectual circles. Van Vechten, who died ten years before Mania was born in Bristol, is

picks February 24, 2006

Ian Anüll

Ian Anüll's serigraph When R Died, 1999, which tells the story of a collector seeking to capitalize on an artist friend's death, introduces this exhibition with a sardonic expression of frustration, concluding: “I can't stand the idea of people trafficking on the death of a painter, so I made him a price for R dead, not R alive.” The show, accompanied by a program of Anüll's short, highly voyeuristic films of urban life (looped on bulky television monitors in supermarket trolleys), argues against the existence of truly “found objects.” Leaning against one wall is Carton Collection, 1985/1990,

Lillian Davies