Lisa Turvey

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  print December 2009

  Tauba Auerbach

  Tauba Auerbach hit the ground running a few years ago with a well-received debut at Deitch, followed by her recent participation in the New Museum’s “Younger Than Jesus” exhibition, and now this second buzzed-about show at the gallery—and she’s not yet thirty. Precociousness often keeps company with impatience, and on first look it seems Auerbach has dispensed with the concerns of her earlier work with typography, alphabets, and codes in favor of the even brainier bailiwicks of logic and physics. She, however, identifies a through-line: A previous interest in how language can embarrass and even

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  print November 2009

  Magnus Plessen

  Almost all of the nine canvases in Magnus Plessen’s recent show include the form of a hand, frequently in multiple: a squat, glovelike shape, often truncated at the knuckles or just before the wrist, usually out of proportion to and floating free from the paintings’ human figures. As symbols go, it’s an obvious one, represented in accordingly clumsy fashion as a simplified glyph of unmodulated color or in white silhouette. Spiel (Game), 2009, pictures two people seated at a small table on which are stacked three such palms, proposing the body part as food, game, or currency.

  The press release

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  print October 2009

  Carol Bove and Janine Lariviere

  Beauty, reflection, mimesis, vanity, knowledge: Comprehending all of these concepts, it’s no wonder the Narcissus legend has proved a hardy subject and allegorical theme for artists for centuries—to say nothing of its metaphoric utility for philosophers and critics. But the myth’s material denouement, those namesake flowers that sprout from the site where the prepossessing young hunter perished, has had less of an afterlife.

  Carol Bove made narcissus blooms a focus of her exhibition at the Horticultural Society of New York this past summer, in the form of an accordion-style picture book by artist

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  previews September 2009

  Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection

  With this retrospective, Anne Truitt, who died in 2004, finally gets the full treatment.

  With this retrospective, Anne Truitt, who died in 2004, finally gets the full treatment. Included will be several of the painted wooden abstractions that caught Clement Greenberg’s eye in the late 1960s, eliciting comparisons to Donald Judd and Robert Morris, as well as lesser known work from the succeeding three decades, when she experimented with metal fabrication, augmented her signature columnar forms with horizontal extensions, and developed a two-dimensional practice. From the beginning, Truitt insisted on the importance of referentiality and color—both troublesome

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  previews September 2009

  Guillermo Kuitca: Everything, Paintings and Works on Paper, 1980–2008

  Employing motifs such as maps, architectural plans, and genealogical charts, Guillermo Kuitca makes borders and links central to his practice.

  Employing motifs such as maps, architectural plans, and genealogical charts, Guillermo Kuitca makes borders and links—as well as their political and personal mediation—central to his practice. Miami is thus a fitting location to launch this touring midcareer survey, which traces the contours of the Argentinean artist’s oeuvre with some seventy drawings and paintings. One standout is Untitled, 1992 (on view for the first time in the United States), an arrangement of twenty child-size beds with road maps of Europe painted directly onto their mattresses—elegantly cleaving

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  print September 2009

  Lara Schnitger

  Spiderwebs of black nylon, made by tensing women’s hosiery over wooden chopsticks into interconnecting spiky snowflake forms, extended from floor to ceiling in Lara Schnitger’s latest show, partitioning the gallery and screening the objects. The look was equal parts Halloween decoration and s/m gear, but both fast proved red herrings; this is her mildest work in years. Instead of the rowdy patchwork sculptures for which Schnitger is best known, the bulk of the exhibition comprised mixed-media textile paintings, and her previous sexual and political frankness has been traded for signs of snug

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  print Summer 2009

  Rudolf Stingel

  Rudolf Stingel’s 2005 exhibition at Paula Cooper consisted of one work, a painting of his gallerist based on a Robert Mapplethorpe portrait. Installed on the back wall of Cooper’s cavernous space, whose floors were covered with white panels that recorded visitors’ tracks, the picture turned the white cube into a shrine and its founder into a godhead. The holies were more literal in the artist’s latest show, which comprised five diminutive, black-and-white oil-on-linen paintings of saints sourced from photographs of statues and hung one per wall across two rooms. Such austerity rendered the

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  previews May 2009

  “Raoul De Keyser: Replay (Paintings 1964–2007)”

  Unaligned with any single postwar style, Raoul De Keyser kept pace with the major movements of the past half century—from humdrum Pop subjects in the 1960s and experiments with monochrome in the ’70s to gestural expressionism in the ’80s and intimate, to agently washed abstractions in recent years.

  Raoul De Keyser’s career has been an exemplary slow burn: Born in 1930, the painter has garnered substantive attention outside his native Belgium only in the past two decades. Unaligned with any single postwar style, his protean output—from humdrum Pop subjects in the 1960s and experiments with monochrome in the ’70s to gestural expressionism in the ’80s and intimate, gently washed abstractions in recent years—has nonetheless kept pace with the major movements of the past half century. There is, however, a consonance to De Keyser’s practice despite its catholicity,

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  print May 2009

  Robert Barry

  A dash in the title of Robert Barry’s recent exhibition at Yvon Lambert, “RB 62–08,” might more accurately have been an ampersand. With one exception, the show’s paintings, texts, and photographs date from either the 1960s or the past two years (or both: The diptych 62–08 takes its name from the vintages of its component canvases, and a suite of vinyl phrases applied to the wall was conceived in 1969 and only given form now). Although this still institutionally unsung artist is long overdue for a full-dress retrospective, the lack of material from the intervening decades—wire and thread sculptures

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  print April 2009

  Peter Doig

  In a roundtable in these pages one year ago, Peter Doig became the fall guy for several participants’ vexations with the big bad art market. One had to feel a little sorry for him in the reckoning: One of his paintings, through no doings of his own, breaks auction records for a work by a living European artist, and he gets pitted against no less a luminary than Giovanni Battista Tiepolo as quintessential of what art historian James Meyer called the market’s “overestimation of the contemporary.” Economies, art and otherwise, are of course worlds different now, and the point that Doig’s work (like

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  print February 2009

  Ben Dean

  Ben Dean’s Account, 2002–2008, the exceptional installation that constituted his first solo show, is really two accounts—one a 16-mm color film, the other a gray-toned, computer-generated video—of three places. The Los Angeles –based artist selected locations in the San Francisco Bay Area that are emblematic of distinct urban-redevelopment episodes: Islais Landing, a former tidal bog that once served as a sewage channel and slaughterhouse dumping ground; San Francisco City Hall, a Beaux Arts monument whose harmonious proportions and massive domed rotunda are meant to pique municipal pride (and

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  print January 2009

  Logan Grider

  In his first solo exhibition, Logan Grider showed fifteen intimately sized abstractions, works he intends, according to the press release, to be “representations of sounds, emotional states, conversations, and actions.” That’s a big charge for little paintings, and, to the young artist’s credit, one that many of his canvases fulfill handily. But this achievement is a secondary one. The formal antics of these paintings are so involved (and involving) that synesthesia, allusion, and even depiction as such are superfluous points of reference.

  Each composition, oil on canvas over panel, contains a