print May 2017

Mel O’Callaghan

For the better part of the past decade, Mel O’Callaghan has produced large-scale performances and installations for venues including the Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2016 and 2017) and the Sydney Biennale (2014), all the while quietly making paintings in the privacy of her studio. The artist’s recent exhibition at Galerie Allen (which she cofounded in 2013 with curator Joseph Allen Shea) marked the first public glimpse of this heretofore unseen body of work. While representing a significant material departure for the Paris-based Australian—whose better-known work typically combines elements

print April 2017

Ricardo Brey

Ricardo Brey’s recent exhibition, “All that is could be otherwise,” comprised mainly recent collages on drawings and photographs, but its physical and conceptual centerpiece was a sculptural work that dates to the dawn of the millennium. For those unfamiliar with the Cuban-born artist who rose to prominence in the 1980s as a founding member of the avant-garde Volumen I collective, Birdland, 2001—a large nest made of old coats cradling several ostrich eggs and a swanlike saxophone—introduced two of Brey’s hallmarks: a strong association between nature and music (specifically Afro-Cuban

print January 2017

“Art and Liberty: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948)”

THE PROLIFIC EGYPTIAN SURREALIST COLLECTIVE Art and Liberty has been directly inserted into the center of its European counterpart this winter. In Paris, the Pompidou’s “Art and Liberty: Rupture, War and Surrealism in Egypt (1938–1948)” demonstrates the vibrant contemporary interest in Egyptian modernism, paralleling a similarly themed exhibition this past fall at the Palace of Arts in Cairo. Framed in the city of Breton et al., the work drove home the relationship between anticolonialism and antifascism, East and West. (Indeed, the group’s manifesto, with which the show opens, makes a pointed

print December 2016

Shana Moulton

The latest chapter in Shana Moulton’s ongoing video and performance saga “Whispering Pines,” 2002–, is Act One from Whispering Pines 10, 2016, a nine-minute video based on an opera she developed and performed with composer/vocalist Nick Hallett. In the live version, which premiered at the Kitchen in New York in 2010, Moulton’s alter ego Cynthia, a hypochondriac introvert with a wild imagination, mimes and dances in front of projections of mountains, forests, and her wacky home, which is decorated with a Himalayan rock-salt lamp, a yoga mat, a crystal pyramid, and other assorted New Age tchotchkes,

print October 2016

Jay DeFeo

In 1951, just after graduating from the University of California, Berkeley, and before settling into San Francisco’s vibrant Beat community—where her cohorts included Allen Ginsberg, Wallace Berman, and Bruce Conner—Jay DeFeo traveled to Europe and North Africa on a fellowship. Bringing attention to rarely seen works from this prolific period, DeFeo’s first solo show in Paris featured two drawings made in this city in 1951, presented in the company of twenty-two paintings, collages, drawings, and photographs made between 1972 and 1987 (all lent by the Jay DeFeo Foundation). The budding

print September 2016

Robert Breer

In the early 1950s, Robert Breer, at the time a geometric abstract painter living in Paris, came to the realization that his interest lay in “the process of painting rather than any fixed composition.” This epiphany, which would eventually lead the artist to abandon painting altogether, inspired his first films, a tetralogy of short animations in which forms previously locked down on canvas were freed to morph and dance about the frame. Thematically bookended by Form Phases 4, 1954, and a 16-mm film from Breer’s mature period, Fuji, 1974, the recent exhibition “Between Cinema and Fixed Imagery”

print Summer 2016

Adam Cruces

Sometimes moving forward requires looking back. This seems to be the case for Adam Cruces, whose recent exhibition “Pastel” was spawned from one of the artist’s earliest works. Still Life, 1993, 1993/2016, a remake of a pastel done when Cruces was all of eight years old, is a far cry from the slick multimedia art for which the Houston-born, Zurich-based artist is known. Presented in a traditional gilded frame, Cruces’s textbook still life features an overflowing fruit basket with a knife and a metal pitcher arranged on red drapery. The studious composition conjures a vision of the young artist

print May 2016

Thomas Fougeirol

Thomas Fougeirol is a painter who paints as if he were printing, meaning he uses paint to take imprints of actions and objects rather than using it to represent them. Channeling another French artist, Yves Klein, who famously attached canvas to the roof of his car in order to capture the effects of wind, rain, and dirt, Fougeirol has left paintings out in the elements. Whereas the moonlike cratered surfaces of his “Tableaux de pluie” (Rain Paintings), 2010–, document natural phenomena—rain falling on wet oil paint—the artist’s most recent works chart an intimate universe: his own

print April 2016

Larissa Fassler

Writing about “pickpockets and paranoia in France” for the New Yorker in 2014, Adam Gopnik described Paris’s Gare du Nord as a place where tourists, “looking for a week’s pleasure, mingled with travellers recently arrived from Bulgaria and Romania, looking for a job or a new life.” This same crossroads—the French capital’s oldest and, notoriously, unruliest train station—became the focus of Larissa Fassler’s attention while on a residency in Paris in 2014. Over the course of three months, the Berlin-based Canadian artist spent hundreds of hours, day and night, surveying and documenting

print March 2016

Jean-Marc Bustamante

Having begun his artistic career well over three decades ago as a photographer, Jean-Marc Bustamante has since worked across diverse media to produce sculptures, prints, paintings, and installations. His tellingly titled series “Aperture,” 2015–, is the latest reminder that no matter what materials, tools, or processes Bustamante employs, his work remains conceptually rooted in photography.

The nine large-format ink-jet prints on silver photographic paper that were featured in Bustamente’s recent show are based on scans of his colored-felt-tip-marker drawings. Installed in numerical order across

picks February 04, 2016

Peter Shire

Peter Shire’s current show is the result of long-distance conversations between French curator Julie Boukobza and the Los Angeles–born and –based artist. Via email and Skype, together they selected drawings and small three-dimensional works in metal, ceramics, and wood from the 1980s through 2015. The resulting miniretrospective celebrates Shire’s multifaceted oeuvre with a mix of functional design objects and decorative objets d’art.

Nearly forty three-dimensional works are informally arranged on a large, custom-built table that leaves the viewer just barely enough space to navigate the gallery’s

print February 2016

“Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno”

Living up to its impassioned title, “Ugo Rondinone: I ♥ John Giorno” was an adulation of the American counterculture icon as a poet, artist, friend, lover, activist, archivist, muse, and inspiration. Conceived by his longtime partner, Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone, and curated by Florence Ostende, Giorno’s first-ever retrospective was an exhaustive yet intimate showcase comprising more than three hundred artworks, six hundred audible poems, and fifteen thousand archival photos and documents. It was also a tribute show featuring works by Rondinone, Angela Bulloch, Anne Collier, Verne Dawson, Judith

print January 2016

Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

In 1977, a twelve-year-old Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster visited Marcel Duchamp’s exhibition at the newly opened Centre Pompidou. Evoking this seminal experience at the threshold to her own Pompidou survey thirty-eight years later, Gonzalez-Foerster adhered a life-size transparent photograph of Duchamp’s show to a street-facing glass wall and retrofitted the abutting exhibition space with elements of the museum’s original decor. Inside this installation, Espace 77, 2015, viewers stand on period gray carpeting amid Michel Cadestin’s President armchairs and look through ghostly images of Duchamp’s

interviews December 07, 2015

Julien Prévieux

Julien Prévieux, winner of the 2014 Marcel Duchamp prize, here discusses his current solo exhibition at Espace 315 at the Centre Pompidou in the context of the recent terrorist attacks in Paris. Focusing on a particular body of work included in the show, “Atelier de dessin - B.A.C. du 14e arrondissement de Paris” (Drawing Workshop: Anti-crime Police Officers from Paris’s Fourteenth Arrondissement), 2011–, a collaboration with Parisian police officers, Prévieux addresses the unintended political implications of this series. The exhibition is on view through February 1, 2016.

AMONG MY WORKS

print December 2015

the 13th Biennale de Lyon

IN HIS CATALOGUE ESSAY for “La vie moderne,” the thirteenth edition of the Biennale de Lyon, curator Ralph Rugoff points out one of modernism’s most enduring paradoxes: If the desire for rupture is, as he puts it, “the modernist gesture par excellence,” then the urge to break free from the modern era is “merely a symptom of the modernity it aspires to bury.” Modernism, in other words, is very much with us still—whether we admit it or not. Indeed, as Rugoff argues, its myriad impulses and effects continue to thread their way through contemporary culture in complex and contradictory ways. To

print December 2015

Bettina Samson

Facing off from opposite ends of the gallery, two small wall-mounted sculptures in Bettina Samson’s recent show bookended a wide spectrum of three-dimensional works. At the entrance was the cratered, amorphous, and mottled More Honour’d in the Breach 1, 2014. The informe incarnate, this hole-riddled green-glazed earthenware object was in stark contrast to the minimalist Bauspiel, 2015, directly across the room. Titled after a Bauhaus building-block set, this orderly construction of wooden letterpress blocks resembles a miniature of a David Smith “Cubi,” 1961–65. Arrayed between these two

print October 2015

Jim Dine

At eighty, Jim Dine still has a few tricks up his sleeve. Five recent sculptures featuring the artist’s toolbox staples—hammers, wrenches, pliers, hooks, saws, C-clamps, and so on—include a material he has rarely worked with before: glass. Souvenirs of his family’s hardware store as well as extensions of his own hands, Dine’s tools have been an autobiographical motif since the 1960s, showing up in drawings, paintings, sculptures, prints, and photographs. Literally and figuratively breathing new life into his personal iconography, Dine’s foray into glassblowing (a collaboration with

print September 2015

Florian and Michael Quistrebert

In dialogue with a long history of painters’ attempts to represent light and harness its dematerializing effects—from Vermeer to Monet to Rothko—the latest works by Florian and Michael Quistrebert sparkle and shine, thanks to the iridescent car paints and tiny, battery-powered lightbulbs used in many of them. In contrast to the brothers’ previous muted geometric compositions, their new paintings are characterized by thick gestural strokes and flashy jewel tones. “Hyperdelia,” the first exhibition dedicated to the “Overlight” series begun in 2013, introduced this body of work with a

picks July 23, 2015

Meschac Gaba

Born in Benin and based in the Netherlands, Meschac Gaba made his first wigs following a residency in New York City. Stimulated by Manhattan’s skyline and hair-braiding salons, Gaba’s series of “Architecture Tresses,” 2005–2006, interpreted landmarks like the Chrysler Building as vertiginous synthetic hairpieces. The fourteen wigs currently on view here represent European monuments and various historical figures.

Paris is well represented in wig form by five re-creations of iconic buildings, such as Notre-Dame de Paris, 2006, whose bell towers of woven brown braids evoke a woolly horned beast.

interviews June 10, 2015

Philippe Parreno

Paris-based artist Philippe Parreno’s installation H{N)YPN(Y}OSIS, 2015, is a fluid and infinitely variable composition of audio and visual elements that the artist can individually manipulate using an iPad. Parreno will be on site for the duration of the show, choreographing an ongoing, ever-changing dance featuring videos, sculptures, and live performances. H{N)YPN(Y}OSIS opens at the Park Avenue Armory on June 11 and will run through August 2, 2015.

UNTIL THIS PROJECT, the tools I had at my disposal to visualize a show were basically computer programs designed for positioning objects within

Mara Hoberman