Mara Hoberman

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  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”

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  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

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  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

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  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

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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