Lloyd Wise

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  print November 2014

  Knud Lonberg-Holm

  Like anything, the appeal of high modernism ebbs and flows. This presentation of architect Knud Lonberg-Holm’s work, assembled from an archive of photographs, drawings, letters, and other materials compiled by the late historian Marc Dessauce, suggests that in our precarious, decentralized moment, its allure is on the upswing.

  Lonberg-Holm—who, until Dessauce’s heroic scholarly efforts, had largely been forgotten—was born in 1895. In 1923, after working for several years with the Berlin Bauhaus in Germany and De Stijl in his native Denmark, he settled in New York, where he quickly

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  print October 2014

  Matthew Palladino

  Computer “graphical interfaces” have a cultural significance that is impossible to overstate. The window, the toolbar, the drop-down menu, the scroll bar: These ubiquitous mechanisms mediate our interactions with the digital—which is to say, an outsize portion of our work and play. (As others have noted, what Leo Steinberg called the flatbed picture plane—artwork as matrix of information, receptacle of data, vector in transmission—anticipated the computer desktop’s mode of address.) For his first solo show in New York, San Francisco–based artist Matthew Palladino presented eight

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  print September 2014

  Vincent Fecteau

  “My continuing struggle is that I want to express this cheesy emotion that I know isn’t cheesy,” said Vincent Fecteau in 1995. “And I don’t know how to do it.” Such a mission is difficult, but if the solution is elusive, the struggle has been generative. Almost twenty years later, he’s still going at it. In the press release for this recent show, Fecteau states: “I feel like I’m always trying to figure out the same thing. . . . I can’t define what that thing is. It’s a feeling or a sound or a song. Maybe it’s a kind of mood.”

  At Matthew Marks, Fecteau’s attempts to home in on the nameless emotion

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  print Summer 2014

  Charlotte Posenenske

  It is somewhat difficult to believe, but until quite recently, Charlotte Posenenske was little more than a footnote, effectively forgotten by the art-historical literature until a modest installation of her reliefs and participatory sculptures at Documenta 12 in 2007 brought her memory roaring to life. Since then, the late German artist has been exhibited widely in Europe and the United States, celebrated as much for the way in which she married a sculptural practice to “the social” as for her work’s coolly industrial mien. But Posenenske’s sculpture is only part of the story. This small show

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  print May 2014

  “Looking Back: The 8th White Columns Annual”

  In the eight years since its inception, the White Columns Annual has emerged as one of the more anticipated events of the New York art calendar. The premise—a curator’s selection of artworks on view in the city in the year preceding the show’s opening—reliably yields a specific kind of exhibition, one that tends to be vaguely nostalgic and introspective, less a presentation of art objects than a display of semipersonal keepsakes or aide-mémoire. This year’s edition was organized by Pati Hertling, a lawyer and curator known for, among other endeavors, the now defunct but fondly remembered

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  print April 2014

  Josephine Halvorson

  In this show—her second solo exhibition at the gallery—Josephine Halvorson presented ten formidable paintings portraying artful decay. All created freehand and most in plein air, the canvases depict flattish or relief-like surfaces found in the vicinity of her studio and home in rural western Massachusetts: a boarded-up window frame, a panel used as a mold to pour a cement foundation, a shallow fireplace, a woodshed door. As in Halvorson’s earlier work, the application of paint reveals keen powers of observation married to an impressive facility with her medium. A person could spend

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  print March 2014

  Robert Bechtle

  By now, the once-provocative innovations of Photorealism are so embedded in contemporary art that they barely register at all. Take a photographic image, paint it faithfully from a projected slide: This method is ubiquitous, deployed in a wide range of ways to a variety of effects. So it is surprising to be reminded just how offensive this practice once was. Promulgated by OK Harris gallery in the late 1960s, Photorealism, for artists such as Richard Estes, Ralph Goings, or John Baeder, was a logical extension of Pop art. But, at that moment of high Minimalism and Conceptualism, its emphasis on

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  print February 2014

  Larry Poons

  The strangest item in this small exhibition of early work by Larry Poons was a brief, grainy audio recording of a short-lived rock ’n’ roll group called the Druds. Formed by Andy Warhol in 1963, the Druds released no records and never once performed live, yet they are remembered today for a lineup that is almost comically auspicious: Walter De Maria on drums, La Monte Young on saxophone, Poons on guitar, and Jasper Johns, Patty Oldenburg, Lucas Samaras, and Warhol himself singing. A star-studded cast, indeed, but even illustriousness can fall flat. The track, “No More Apologies,” is a case study

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  print January 2014

  Patricia Treib

  The open, airy abstractions in Patricia Treib’s recent exhibition at Wallspace—her first at this gallery—are marked by patches of color and a delicate, decorative line. Executed with a wide brush, the strokes are playful and improvisatory, appearing at times as patterned squiggles, zigzags, or loops, and sometimes resolutely defining a shape. Yet the abstractness of the compositions is undermined by vague intimations of representation—the suggestion of a head, or of a domestic interior. The peculiar indeterminacy of these images results from the fact that the works derive explicitly

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  print December 2013

  Paul Feeley

  Big, bold, and vibrant, Paul Feeley’s paintings are hard to miss. Rarely shown in the decades following his death in 1967, the artist’s sculptures and abstract canvases were given a major exhibition at Matthew Marks Gallery in 2002. Now we have this smaller show, featuring nine large paintings made between 1957 and 1962.

  Feeley’s style is distinctive. His forms hover on the cusp between biomorphic and severely geometric, consisting of a vocabulary of oblongs and rounded corners, simple shapes and curves informed by Moorish tile design and classical art. In the 1940s, Feeley broke with Abstract

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  print November 2013

  Erika Vogt

  At the New Museum this past summer, Erika Vogt presented Stranger Debris Roll Roll Roll, 2013, a project at once austere and enigmatic. Related to her 2012 installations The Engraved Plane and Grounds and Airs, shown last year at Simone Subal Gallery in New York and at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, respectively, the work was framed in the exhibition wall text as an extension of the artist’s interest in the subject of exchange. Yet in actuality, this theme felt sidelined here, subsumed within a more wide-ranging, albeit oblique, poetic reflection on the transformative nature of the studio.

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  print October 2013

  Mac Adams

  To begin his essay published for Mac Adams’s exhibition this past summer, critic David Campany catalogues the many allusions to be found in the photographer’s work: “detective stories and news reportage, crime scenes and film noir, the Nouveau Roman and the photo-roman, movie publicity and film frames, snapshots and high art, advertising and the still life, voyeurism and exhibitionism, glamour and horror, sculpture and painting, literature and architecture.” That sounds about right. The eleven pieces that were in this show—all part of the “Mysteries” series, 1973–80—evince a deep,