Lisa Turvey

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  print September 2011

  Richard Long

  With River Avon Mud Crescent, 2011, Richard Long achieves the unlikely effect of making the twenty-nine-foot-high ground-floor gallery of Sperone Westwater’s young Bowery outpost seem cramped. A disc of black acrylic gesso overlain by a waxing moon form created with hand-applied squiggles of mud, the work nearly covers the double-height wall; runoff sludge splatters the floor and ceiling. Even with the perspective afforded by the mezzanine, the view is no less awesome—seeing it was like having a front-row seat at some sort of primitive planetarium. Though this was the most striking instance,

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  print Summer 2011

  Sonia Delaunay

  In the first decade of the twentieth century, Robert and Sonia Delaunay together developed what their friend Apollinaire would baptize “Orphism” and what the couple named “Simultaneism”—the infusing of Cubism’s fractured planes with side-by-side, contrasting colors to effect the sensation of movement that the Futurists were concurrently pursuing. Their subsequent output, however, as if a parable of one of modern abstraction’s hardiest paradoxes, diverged on the road to the real. He took the idealist fork—believing his “Fenêtres” (Windows), 1912–13, paintings to be transparent to pure

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  print April 2011

  Hurvin Anderson

  The thirteen paintings and one diptych, most intimately sized but some of epic dimensions, in Hurvin Anderson’s first New York solo gallery exhibition can be classified as landscapes: They picture the lush, equatorial scenery of Trinidad, where the London-based artist spent some time a few years ago. That they are all predominantly green thus stands to reason. Why, then, did the omnipresent verdancy (in all its guises—lime to teal, olive to emerald) feel at times superfluous, a gilding-the-lily excess?

  The answer, I think, is that Anderson is at heart just as much an abstract painter as he

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  print March 2011

  E. V. Day

  Last summer, E. V. Day spent three months as an artist in residence at Monet’s garden in Giverny, France, with the charge that she find inspiration in the floral idyll being the only condition of her stay. The fifty works that visit yielded, fifteen of which comprised this show, began as horticultural residua. Day trailed Giverny’s gardeners on their pruning rounds and selected the most striking of the clipped botanicals, which she then pressed in a microwave, scanned digitally, and printed, magnified to eighteen times their original size, on photo paper. Color has not been manipulated, but form

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  print February 2011

  Brian Wills

  For Brian Wills, a Los Angeles artist, modernist abstraction—its East and West Coast modes alike—is still fertile territory. Fourteen of his exactingly crafted geometric paintings, wood panels layered with rows or grids of colored rayon thread and pigmented varnishes and enamels, made up his New York solo debut. Most are modestly sized, but a few extend to eight feet wide; some feature vibrant strands on pastel or neutral fields, though a number of supports are covered in electric hues; several have allover patterns, while the lines in still others cluster irregularly or mass toward

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  previews January 2011

  Ed Ruscha: Road Tested

  In Ed Ruscha’s 1967 artist’s book Royal Road Test, language hits the highway. Through photos that resemble crime scene evidence, it documents the aftermath of defenestrating a typewriter from a moving Buick, a caper that synthesized two of the artist’s enduring preoccupations—words and roads.

  In Ed Ruscha’s 1967 artist’s book Royal Road Test, language hits the highway. Through photos that resemble crime scene evidence, it documents the aftermath of defenestrating a typewriter from a moving Buick, a caper that synthesized two of the artist’s enduring preoccupations—words and roads. While Ruscha’s linguistic endeavors have been ably examined in exhibition and criticism alike, this show is the first to consider the automotive as a through-line in his work. It is most apparent as subject, in images of streets and maps, filling stations and car grilles. Yet,

• previews January 2011

  Vija Celmins: Desert, Sea, and Stars

  Featuring some seventy paintings, drawings, and prints from the past forty years, this exhibition takes place not far from where the Riga-born artist remembers her creative life beginning, her family having fled to West Germany (before emigrating to the US) in advance of the Soviet occupation of Latvia when she was still a child.

  Featuring some seventy paintings, drawings, and prints from the past forty years, this exhibition takes place not far from where the Riga-born artist remembers her creative life beginning, her family having fled to West Germany (before emigrating to the US) in advance of the Soviet occupation of Latvia when she was still a child. Desert, sea, and stars have long been Celmins’s mainstays; the show will accordingly be organized around these subjects. Such boundless categories hazard unrepresentability, but through graphic exactitude and meticulous trompe l’oeil, desert

• print December 2010

  Adam Fuss

  “Home and the World,” Adam Fuss’s third solo exhibition at Cheim & Read, showed his most austere work yet. The artist whose photograms have previously incorporated rabbit entrails, ejaculate, and cow livers hasn’t forsworn corporeality altogether, however: One encountered, on the floor of a small side gallery, a giant daguerreotype of an upclose vulva. Fuss disavows any provocation, erotic or otherwise, averring that his interest in the image had to do with “the architecture of the entrance.” This surprisingly sound plea for formalism aside—the frontal splay of tissue is desensualized to the

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  print November 2010

  Angelo Filomeno

  Whether it’s a sign of inspiration or of exhaustion, the past decade has witnessed the annexing of various cottage industries by a number of contemporary artists, spawning craft-based practices that are now cottage industries in their own right. Two prominent strains, glassblowing and work that incorporates some kind of sewing, can justifiably lay claim to Angelo Filomeno, and, judging from the group exhibitions listed on his CV, have. But while the Italian-born, New York–based artist comes by these pedigrees more honestly (his mother was a dressmaker, his father a blacksmith, and he began

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  previews September 2010

  Rebecca Warren

  Rebecca Warren’s first solo exhibition in an American museum will feature all new work.

  Rebecca Warren’s first solo exhibition in an American museum will feature all new work, including wall-mounted vitrines that assemble miscellany and detritus from her studio, as well as floor sculptures—bulbous figures of bronze and clay whose anatomical mishmashes use humor and hyperbole to undercut the pieties of their macho modernist ancestors. While much of the exhibition is to take place at the Renaissance Society, a second component, at the Art Institute of Chicago, will comprise three site-specific works to be installed outdoors on a terrace above the new Renzo

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  print September 2010

  Vija Celmins

  Encompassing ocean waves and spiderwebs, desert floors and nighttime skies, Vija Celmins’s subjects have long been immense and empyreal, and occasion equally lofty responses, inspiring purple prose from even the driest of critics—but there is nothing otherworldly about their making. These are hard-won wonders, often years in the works: canvases realized with a tiny sable brush and slow-drying alkyd oil; drawings created by the accretion of astonishingly dense, allover graphite marks or the erasure of bits of thick expanses of powdered charcoal; prints made via the difficult mezzotint process.

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  print Summer 2010

  Ken Price

  Ken Price’s output has consistently opposed contemporary art traffic—whether, in the early 1960s, simply by having been made in Los Angeles or, lately, in its unabashed courting of pleasure (“joy,” he says, is the feeling he’s after), to say nothing of the perennial marginalization of ceramics and its cognates, craft and the decorative. Price figures as often in histories of pottery as in those of art, as demonstrated by the catalogues on view in a recent show of ephemera and design projects at Franklin Parrasch Gallery. It was Price’s moment in New York this spring; that exhibition, together