Mara Hoberman

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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

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  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.

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  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

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  print Summer 2015

  Hervé Télémaque

  With more than seventy works borrowed primarily from French public collections, Hervé Télémaque’s recent retrospective reaffirmed the significant institutional support the Haitian-born artist has received in his adoptive country. Télémaque, who arrived in Paris via New York in 1961, has produced a body of work—paintings, sculptures, collages, drawings, and assemblages—that is as aesthetically diverse as it is thematically consistent. Chronologically tracing the development of Télémaque’s unique lexicon—a blend of island motifs, pop-culture iconography, and art-historical