Mara Hoberman

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  picks May 01, 2023

  Cristina Iglesias

  Cristina Iglesias’s exhibition “Monotypes on Copper and Paper” is an expansion of Hondalea (Marine Abyss), 2021, a site-specific public artwork in Spain for which the artist retrofitted an abandoned lighthouse off the coast of San Sebastián with a cast-bronze cavern, hydraulic machinery, and 26,715 cubic meters of churning water. Each a unique evocation of ocean sculpting rock, Iglesias’s prints collectively help to unmoor Hondalea from its remote physical location by introducing new perspectives, materials, and processes.

  Sharing an Arte Povera sensibility with Giuseppe Penone’s bronze tree and

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  print May 2023

  Celia Hempton

  Known for making up-close and personal paintings of faces and genitalia belonging to (mostly male) live-streamers and life models, Celia Hempton has long been interested in what intimacy looks like in our increasingly hybrid virtual/IRL world. Notably, when painting her most recent small-format works, the artist kept her gaze entirely online. Of the eleven oils on view at Sultana, five are from the series “Chatrandom,” 2013– , and depict men Hempton encountered on the video chat site after which the series is named. Accomplished during the real time of each chat, these portraits have an immediacy

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  picks April 10, 2023

  Katinka Bock

  Though best known for her sculptures, Katinka Bock has long kept photography on the periphery of her studio practice. “Der Sonnenstitch” (Sunstroke), the artist’s first photo-focused show, features some sixty-five photographs—mostly gelatin silver prints—taken between 2015 and 23 with a 35-mm film camera. Arranged in pairs and small groupings, the works are presented on the gallery walls and across several custom-designed aluminum-and-green-linen-covered panels suspended from the ceiling. Incorporating another medium into the mise-en-scène, Bock has affixed small, irregular slabs of green-glazed

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  print December 2022

  Mathieu Cherkit

  Mathieu Cherkit’s interiors are homey, relatable, and destabilizing. Characterized by charming disarray—unwashed dishes, scattered toys, yellow rubber gloves near an open toilet bowl—the artist’s latest room-by-room portraits of his home explore domesticity vis-à-vis elastic notions of space and time. In addition to depicting multiple perspectives at once, Cherkit’s paintings contend materially with painting’s inherent flatness and fixity. The fourteen works presented in “Time’s Up?” featured heavy impastos in shades of burgundy, teal, ocher, and cerulean. The jagged crusty paint, extending

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  print Summer 2022

  Jacqueline de Jong

  In the late 1970s, still in her thirties but having made a name for herself as editor of the Situationist Times (1962–67) and as a Cobra-adjacent painter of suicides and car crashes, Jacqueline de Jong turned her attention to a rather Pop subject: billiards. Created in Amsterdam, the eight paintings on view here—part of a series comprising more than twenty “Billiards” paintings, 1976–79—featured different permutations of felted tables, glossy balls, wooden cues, cubed chalk, and male players depicted from odd angles and intimate proximities.

  The particular game featured in these paintings is

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  print April 2022

  Zoe Williams

  Voracious green-and-purple creepers infested Zoe Williams’s recent show, evoking predatory tubers and feelers. The show’s title, “Tendresse Tendril,” pointed to the artist’s interest in etymological roots as well as physical ones. Both words come from the Latin tener, which means “soft” or “delicate.” While tenderness was not always obvious in the works on view, tendrils ran rampant—sprouting up in the form of sea anemones (real and digitally animated), Medusa-like ceramic locks, and long wormy glass tears.

  The centerpiece of the show was the seven-minute video Tendresse Tendril (Worms’ Meat) (

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  print March 2022

  Omer Fast

  In his exhibition “Surplus,” Omer Fast presented new and recent videos, drawings, and sculptures within domestic settings that appeared hastily abandoned. Arrangements of furniture, personal items, moving boxes, trash, and portrait busts covered with cherry pits (Cluster #2–#5, all 2020) created an ambience of transition and deterioration. Adding an eerie vibe, many of the artworks presented in these liminal spaces suggested that our increasingly connected and digitized world is haunted by specters.

  An unmade bed surrounded by nearly empty bookshelves, open storage bins, a rumpled carpet, and

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  picks January 05, 2022

  “Les Flammes: L’Âge de la céramique”

  Heroically recontextualizing contemporary ceramics within a long history of clay idols and vessels, this Anne Dressen–curated exhibition comprises over 350 works made between the Neolithic period and today. Organized thematically rather than chronologically, geographically, or stylistically, the show confronts issues ranging from form and function to intentionality and accident, advocating for a broadened appreciation of a traditionally marginalized medium.           

  “Les Flammes” opens with a selection of artworks intended to illustrate ceramics’ diversity in terms of materiality and technique.

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  picks January 03, 2022

  Cathy Josefowitz

  Pregnant women, harlequins, and human-animal composites appear throughout “The Thinking Body,” the largest retrospective ever dedicated New York–born Swiss national Cathy Josefowitz (1956–2014). Around 1972, these characters first turn up as paper marionettes, which the artist made for her application to study stage design at the Théâtre National de Strasbourg. As representations of bodies in motion, these puppets call to mind Alexander Calder's Circus, 1926–1931, or Matisse’s cutout dancers. Josefowitz’s expressionistic acrobats, however, are more sideshow than big top or ballet—featuring nude

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  print January 2022

  “La Mer Imaginaire”

  Situated on the island of Porquerolles, with views of the Mediterranean, the Villa Carmignac lends itself naturally to a marine-themed exhibition. So titling an exhibition “La mer imaginaire” (The Imaginary Sea) seemed a bit obvious, but curator Chris Sharp overcame that trap with a selection of artworks—bringing Yves Klein, Dora Maar, and Henri Matisse together with the likes of Allison Katz, Mathieu Mercier, and Alex Olson, among others—crafting a pointed rebuke of anthropocentrism in Western culture, science, and politics.

  This overarching theme was most plainly and painfully articulated by

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  print December 2021

  Lydia Ourahmane

  Lydia Ourahmane’s exhibition “Barzakh,” which opened at the Kunsthalle Basel in March 2021 before traveling to Marseille, comprised the contents of the artist’s Algiers apartment. Packed and shipped by friends while Ourahmane was in France, the furnishings (bed, couch, armchairs, dressers, refrigerator, chandeliers) and personal effects (books, papers, makeup, linens, clothes) were arranged in Triangle – Astérides’s airy industrial space according to a floor plan the artist sketched in 2018, the year she moved into the flat. Within this reconstituted home, visitors could move freely from one “

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  picks October 08, 2021

  Kamrooz Aram

  “Un objet, un geste” (An object, a gesture,) Kamrooz Aram’s first solo exhibition in France, calls into question critical hierarchies perpetuated by qualifiers like decorative and non-Western. In the largest painting on view, Untitled (Arabesque Composition in Lapis Lazuli), 2019, curvaceous forms in contrasting shades of brilliant blue are surrounded by a border of untouched linen support. As in other paintings from the Iranian-born artist’s “Arabesque” series (2018–), Aram here recasts so-called ornamental flourishes as the main event while creating a frame—typically, a marker of value that