picks December 21, 2012

“Seuls quelques fragments de nous toucheront quelques fragments d’autrui”

Befitting the author of the show’s title—a poem by Marilyn Monroe (who knew?!)—this survey of contemporary collage is stylish and star-studded. And like Monroe, who struggled to be taken seriously in spite of her sex appeal, this exhibition’s intelligent curatorial conceit is nearly outshone by its own dazzling design.

Aspects of the installation, which commingles work by thirty-six artists made across a wide range of media over the past two decades, are downright deco. John Armleder’s red jellyfish mural (Semaeostomeae VII, 2005) suggests patterned wallpaper opposite Walead Beshty’s gleaming “

picks December 03, 2012

Michael DeLucia

Michael DeLucia’s latest wall-mounted and freestanding sculptures, collectively titled “Projections,” combine DIY aesthetics (planks of plywood fastened with visible screws) with a high-tech—and, to a certain extent, hands-off—process. Employing a computer-controlled wood router, DeLucia engraves intricate patterns of gouges, which, when painted, create illusions of depth and dimension on the plywood’s raw surface. The results suggest CAD outputs made from construction-site scraps. A hybrid of minimalist sculpture and new media, DeLucia’s work does not fit neatly in either genre.

Though his

slant December 02, 2012

Mara Hoberman

AMID GENERAL TIGHTENING of purse strings in Europe, 2012 was a big year for Paris museums. The Palais de Tokyo unveiled a $26 million renovation that tripled its size in April, the Louvre opened a new Islamic wing (its largest expansion since I. M. Pei’s glass pyramids) in September, and “Hopper fever” made the Grand Palais’s retrospective (the American painter’s first in France) a true blockbuster this fall. However, the Musée de l’Art Moderne still has on view the best show of the year. Honoring MAM’s seventieth anniversary, “L’Art en guerre” (Art at War) delivers on its ambitious objective

picks November 07, 2012

Eija-Liisa Ahtila

A portrait of a tree is a fairly straightforward concept. Realizing this image photographically, Finnish video artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila discovered, is easier said than done. While filming The Annunciation, 2010—wherein an all-female cast rehearses and enacts that biblical scene—Ahtila wanted to include a shot of a single tall tree. This vision, however, proved problematic. At close range her camera would capture only a section of the tree, from afar she would wind up with a landscape, and a wide-angle lens would cause distortion. Her solution, Horizontal, 2011—a lateral presentation of six

interviews October 27, 2012

Loris Gréaud

The Snorks: A Concert for Creatures is a new twenty-eight-minute film by French artist Loris Gréaud, starring David Lynch and Charlotte Rampling. The film is currently playing on several screens in Paris and will be shown as part of an international concert tour with Anti-Pop Consortium (who created the film’s subaquatic sound track) this fall and winter. Here Gréaud discusses how he came to make a movie about deep sea creatures’ glowing reaction to an underwater hip-hop concert.

MAKING A HIP-HOP CONCERT FOR SEA CREATURES was an incredible challenge—not least of all I had to explain to my parents

picks October 14, 2012

Charlotte Moth

Charlotte Moth’s photographs and films emphasize the complex relationship between these media and their subject matters. For Moth—who often shoots her own sculptures, assemblages, and staged events and habitually conducts extensive research before setting her camera in a particular location—content and methodology are as much the medium as a digital or analog capture.

The titles of the two films on view underscore Moth’s elastic understanding of what constitutes a “final” artwork. The subject of In Unexpected Places, in Unexpected Lights and Colours (a Sculpture Made to be Filmed) (all works

picks September 27, 2012

“Pas Encore”

The writing’s on the wall (and hanging from the ceiling, and encased in brick): A conceptual and material exploration of language, the group exhibition “Pas Encore” (Not Yet) addresses the muscle and frailty of the written word.

Text appears vulnerable and choked in two works by Jorge Méndez Blake. The ragged right edge of his wall painting—whose shape is based on a page of text from T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land”—alludes to verse, but the words themselves are concealed. Resembling a horizontal bar graph, the lines of text are rendered as solid blocks. In Monument à T. S. Eliot, 2012, a paperback

picks September 17, 2012

Sophie Ristelhueber

Sophie Ristelhueber imbues her photographs—typically unpeopled war-torn landscapes and cityscapes—with a sense of humanity that belies her troubling subject matter. Whether dramatic aerial views of Kuwait in the aftermath of the Gulf War (“Fait,” 1992) or close-ups of improvised road blockades in the West Bank (“WB” 2004–2005), Ristelhueber’s images focus on physical evidence in order to emphasize the social ramifications of conflict and disorder.

In the two series that make up the current exhibition—“Beirut,” 1982–2012, and “Sans titre,” 2011—Ristelhueber uses contrasting methods to

picks June 25, 2012

Amy Sillman

The centerpiece of Amy Sillman’s first solo exhibition in France is a six-minute digital animation comprising 2,000 drawings, which Sillman made on an iPad, accompanied by a voice-over of the artist reading a 2009 poem by Lisa Robertson. Draft of a voice-over for split screen video loop (all works 2012) reprises Sillman’s signature mix of abstract and representational imagery as well as her luscious candy-colored palette—proving that her skill and style as a painter are well adapted to the new technology of digital finger painting. Marrying two of her preferred subjects—language and sexuality—Sillman’s

picks June 04, 2012

Davide Balula

By piling several tons of dirt onto the gallery floor and covering the mound with a custom-built deck—upon which visitors are invited to climb and walk—Davide Balula has created a large-scale vivarium in Le Marais—a district whose name translates as “the marsh,” which is exactly what this now chic and gallery-laden Parisian neighborhood was, prior to the twelfth century. Grasses and other weeds have already sprung up through the slatted wood flooring and around its edges, hinting at the fecundity of this historically reminiscent ecosystem. Yet there is more than plant matter germinating here.

picks May 29, 2012

R. Crumb

As the father of comix, R. Crumb is a near-mythical figure in American counterculture. The illustrated escapades of Mr. Natural, Fritz the Cat, Big Baby, and other memorable characters are droll sociopolitical commentaries that flout American puritanism. From underground comics championing the hippie movement (free love! LSD! women’s lib!), to a solicited yet never published New Yorker cover featuring a hand-holding lesbian couple in front of a squirming marriage license clerk (Marriage License, 2009), Crumb’s style and cultural references are distinctly American. It is not surprising, however,

interviews May 11, 2012

Charles Long

For Pet Sounds at Madison Square Park, California-based artist Charles Long has installed an interactive installation consisting of colored pipe railings. The project was organized by Madison Square Park Conservancy and will be on view until September 9, 2012.

I WANTED TO CREATE SOMETHING THAT PEOPLE WOULD LOVE. An artist can use the invitation to make public work as an opportunity to critique mass consumerism, but that kind of critical relationship does not appeal to me. What led me to the idea for Pet Sounds was in fact my connection to pop culture. The title of my project is also the title of

interviews March 06, 2012

Josephine Meckseper

For the Manhattan Oil Project, the German-born, New York–based artist Josephine Meckseper has installed two twenty-five-foot-tall sculptures inspired by mid-twentieth-century oil pump jacks in The Last Lot, a project space in Times Square organized by Art Production Fund. The project is on view from March 5 to May 6, 2012.

THIS IS technically my first large-scale public sculpture. In the 1990s I produced a conceptual magazine, FAT, which was kind of like public art because it was distributed at local newsstands. Similar to the magazine, the oil pumps are art disguised as something real. Both

picks February 02, 2012

Sarah Sze

Occupying adjacent galleries on the Asia Society’s second floor, eight new installations by Sarah Sze, all from 2011, meet with a selection of her works on paper from the past fifteen years. The juxtaposition of Sze’s installations with her prints, drawings, paper cuttings, and collages flaunts the artist’s fluidity working in both two and three dimensions and highlights the consistency of her peculiar aesthetic despite significant shifts in scale and means of production. In the installations and on paper, Sze’s spiraling vertical landscapes swarm with imagery (representational and invented)

picks January 09, 2012

David Brooks

There’s a housing crisis in New York City. On a touristy theater district block behind a chain-link fence, an assembly of asphalt-shingled rooftops pokes up from the ground. No windows, doors, or signs of inhabitants are visible at street level, but the distinctive peaks summon up the negative associations of suburban sprawl. At first glance, the odd perspective—confronting roofs head-on instead of from below—is pleasantly disorienting, offering Midtown pedestrians a Jack and the Beanstalk moment.

David Brooks’s Desert Rooftops, 2011, is the first installation to grace the Last Lot, an otherwise

picks December 18, 2011

“Signed, Sealed, Delivered”

This lively show features nine artists whose work references or engages directly with various systems of correspondence, such as telegram, FedEx, and e-mail. The pieces range from illustrated and collaged envelopes to handmade postcards to an abstract interpretation of a Twitter feed. The selection, which spans the past six decades, reveals the impact of technology on written communication and also demonstrates the influence of mail art, the genre Ray Johnson is credited with fathering in the 1960s, on artists who wrestle with issues of temporality, intentionality, and authorship.

The earliest

picks December 14, 2011

Harry Callahan

Harry Callahan began making photographs in 1938, at the age of twenty-six, teaching himself to use a camera while working as an accounting clerk for General Motors in Detroit. The one hundred–some photographs brought together in honor of the upcoming centenary of his birth (in 1912) represent six decades of informal, yet iconic, portraits of America. Despite the unavoidably nostalgic imagery of Callahan’s early streetscapes and quotidian scenes (ladies in gloves, men in hats, classic cars), his photographs are remarkably timeless. Their freshness owes to Callahan’s consistent experimentation,

picks October 13, 2011

Alexandra Bircken

Twigs, steel, rope, mortar, and leather are Alexandra Bircken’s materials of choice for her second solo show in New York. The limited earth-toned palette represents a stark departure from her recent colorful knit installations—a new direction that draws due attention to her sculptures’ organic forms and haptic qualities.

Bircken’s interest in the activity and texture of knitting is unremitting. The most interesting piece on view is Twitter (all works 2011), the result of a collaboratiion with Thomas Brinkmann. The work began with a performance on the opening night of the show, in which Bircken

picks July 22, 2011

Marc Swanson

This small but impactful exhibition offers a seductive sampling of Marc Swanson’s work from the past four years. The well-edited selection manages to show off Swanson’s fluid range of materials and to introduce several visual and conceptual motifs, which transcend his greater body of work. Using diverse media including mirrors, wooden beams, lightbulbs, and collage, Swanson references his own personal history as well as more universal themes including fractured self-image, masculine stereotypes, and voyeurism/exhibitionism.

Networks of overlapping and intersecting lines (one of Swanson’s most

picks May 04, 2011

Eva Rothschild

Eva Rothschild’s debut US public art commission, Empire, 2011, is a twenty-foot-tall multidirectional archway perched at the threshold of bustling Midtown Manhattan and the city’s largest green expanse. Until late summer, the structure’s ten welded steel tentacles—painted in alternating bands of red, green, and black—will straddle Doris C. Freedman Plaza (named for New York City’s first director of cultural affairs, founder of the Public Art Fund) at the southeast entrance to Central Park.

Empire provides a graceful physical and psychological gateway between two very different, but equally iconic,