Lucas Matheson

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  picks August 17, 2018

  Anna Torma

  Using appliqué, embroidery, and freehand quilting, Anna Torma plunges into a storehouse of accumulated experience, charting the conversion of attention into memory and meaning-making. Her results are opaque and chaotic: Fragmented animals, isolated words, and anonymous human figures all vie for attention on crowded picture planes. These fiber works, ranging from diaphanous silk organza to comforter-thick quilts, are primarily exhibited framed or draped against the wall. But, crucially, curator Shauna Thompson introduces Torma’s work with a trio of pieces hung from the ceiling, including the

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  picks January 05, 2018

  “Dream of Solentiname”

  This group exhibition tells a story of the Nicaraguan Civil War through the lens of Solentiname, a utopian community established in 1965 by poet, sculptor, and priest Ernesto Cardenal. It features works by community members and other artists sympathetic to their mission. Cardenal is a focal point. His sculptures, vibrant depictions of plants and animals, have a gallery to themselves, as do the community’s paintings. These brilliant works, such as Marita Guevara’s Jesús expulsa a los mercaderes del templo (Jesus Expels the Merchants from the Temple), 1981, reimagine biblical stories in Nicaraguan

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  picks August 04, 2017

  “The Boat Is Leaking. The Captain Lied”

  Spread across three floors of an eighteenth-century palazzo, this exhibition visualizes a broad question: What happens when falsehoods stand in for the truth? For this collaboration, curator Udo Kittelmann, artist Thomas Demand, set designer Anna Viebrock, and filmmaker Alexander Kluge look to the eternal worry over art’s duplicity. This time around, at issue are not the objects themselves as much as the walls that support them.

  The design of the show is provocative, blurring distinctions between discrete works and a single massive installation piece. Viebrock’s stage sets from previous theatrical