Matthew Weinstein

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  print February 2020

  Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg

  Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg’s exhibition at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery was dominated by four macabre stop-motion animations. In This Is Heaven (all works 2019), a hairy, goblin-faced man wakes up inside his own fantasy of wealth and power. The video is reminiscent of Eugène Delacroix’s La mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus), 1827, a canvas depicting a scene from the story of an Assyrian monarch who orders the destruction of his slaves, horses, and other possessions after his army has been routed so that his property doesn’t get usurped by his enemies. Like Sardanapalus, Djurberg and

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  print February 2019

  Allen Frame

  “Innamorato,” an exhibition by the writer, filmmaker, and photographer Allen Frame, was dominated by Ennio, 2018, a room-size installation made up of more than fifty found Italian Mussolini-era photographs of an air force pilot, his sister, and a handsome young man. The pictures, hung salon style, were set into a variety of secondhand frames. The subjects of the photos appeared well off, beautiful, and youthful. They could be seen with skis in the mountains and cavorting on beaches, bringing to mind the bourgeois family in Vittorio De Sica’s 1970 film The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.

  Seven

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  picks May 11, 2018

  Hipkiss

  Each of the art duo Hipkiss’s graphite, ink, and metal-leaf drawings—more than seven feet tall—are composed of seven tondos, stacked. Within each tondo is a section of a magnificent imaginary plant. The rendering is reminiscent of Victorian botanical prints, in which the eye of the scientist dominates that of the aesthete. The line quality is certainly reminiscent of Aubrey Beardsley, as well as H. R. Giger and Erté. The elegance contrasts nicely with the ink’s direct presence on the paper. Notations along the edges of the works are diaristic, inscrutable.

  The drawings’ spliced geometric forms

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  picks March 16, 2018

  Pam Lins

  A cycloramic print of slide drawers, of the kind used by predigital professors of art history, wraps around Pam Lins’s exhibition here. The labels have been replaced by a spectrum of monochrome rectangles. It’s as if art’s timeline, after one too many conflicting narratives, has now been reorganized by color. Inside this is a circle of cheerful blond-wood stools with footrests that match the hues of the slide drawers. On each stool sits a pointed ceramic block. In the center, a blue, rectilinear metal tree, swipe puddle tree (all works 2018), sprouts fruit-size aluminum forms, each incised with

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  slant February 08, 2018

  Man of the People

  THE TERM ARTIST’S ARTIST means an artist who is a good food source for other artists. It also suggests an unconscious and/or brave level of subjectivity that is implicit within the meaning of, but rarely lives up to, the word artist. Artist’s artists signal their value to other artists not just through their stubborn individuality, but also through their ways of producing art that seem so particular that, whether one likes their work or not, there is life before it and life after it. To refer to Michelangelo as an artist’s artist could be seen as absurd, as he is everyone’s artist, but it’s not

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  picks February 02, 2018

  Maryam Jafri

  Maryam Jafri’s “War on Wellness” states that the wellness industry has polluted more than it has detoxed. The exhibition has resonance now that pseudoscience, in the form of climate-change deniers and flat-earthers, has become authority. If “wellness” only targeted the affluent, it would be a mere perpetrator of victimless crimes, no more dangerous than a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s soap—but it isn’t. It’s part of a nexus of unattainable dreams and delusions that have hijacked our best instincts toward ourselves and sold them to the almighty Oz.

  Self-care, 2017 is a toilet-paper roll made from a

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  picks October 06, 2017

  Lucas Samaras

  Lucas Samaras looks at life through the kaleidoscope of his own work, like an Idealist philosopher entertaining the possibility that the world may cease to exist without his direct observation of it. Unlike other artists who transform the creating self into narcissistic phantasmagoria, Samaras comes close to an obsessive outsider sensibility that divorces his work from that of his contemporaries. Nonetheless, Samaras has always been there to remind us that aggressive subjectivity is a rebellious option.

  The artist’s current exhibition of photographs is made up of rooms hung with twelve-inch-square

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  picks June 09, 2017

  Ivana Bašić

  Ivana Bašić’s recent exhibition centers on two sculptures of humanoid creatures with beautiful gold glass placentas encasing their drooping heads: I will lull and rock my ailing light in my marble arms #1 and #2 (all works cited, 2017). They are being born out of chrome shells à la Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, 1486, as envisioned by H. R. Giger. Elsewhere, two head-size chunks of pink alabaster are rhythmically pulverized by silvery robotic hammers (A thousand years ago 10 seconds of breath were 40 grams of dust #1 and #2). Particles accumulate on the floor.

  There is no high or low in contemporary

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  picks March 10, 2017

  Ron Gorchov

  There is much evidence of classicism in reductive art practices. Rarer, however, is the presence of the more willful and subjective impulses of neoclassicism, in which classical order is not adhered to but depicted. Ron Gorchov’s signature shield-shaped paintings would not be out of place gripped by a dying marble warrior. Gorchov’s canvas, featuring a rounded edge and a concavity in the center, is not an optical illusion or a sculptural push into space—it is an image open to interpretation. The fact that these paintings encourage symbolic viewing sets them apart from much contemporaneous

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  picks November 25, 2016

  Sara Deraedt

  For her recent exhibition, Sara Deraedt photographed vacuums in store windows in various international locations. These are the sort of window displays in which the device is just placed and lit—no sales props. Therefore, besides the fact that some of the pieces depict prices in different currencies, we might not consider geography. Deraedt is like an anti-anthropologist, traveling around the world and concluding with, “I got nothing.” There is a gentle absurdity and humor to this project. In dyson animal, 2013, there is some lint near the nozzle, which suggests either the appliance’s past

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  print May 1994

  Jim Hodges

  Jim Hodges sends letters on baby-blue stationary adorned with baby-blue-how stickers, which arrive in light-pink envelopes embellished with butterflies. Appearances to the contrary, they’re not camp but pretty, kind of touching, and a hit melancholy. To describe such missives (and much of Hodges’ work) as “feminine” is to say nothing more than that his sensibility overlaps with that social myth.

  The centerpiece of Hodges’ first one-person exhibition in New York was A Diary of Flowers, 1994, which consisted of 565 pen doodles of flowers on paper napkins pinned around the main room of the gallery

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  print January 1994

  Free Hand

  Pleasure
  I dreamed that my hand detached itself from my body. It began to travel, feeling and affecting everything. This was a good dream.
  

  More Pleasure
  I lied about the dream: I had it while I was awake. I wanted to explain an ideal of pleasure, the pleasure of unlimited extension.
  

  Miró
  His hand clasps a fine brush and travels. It climbs into the night sky and connects the stars into new signs of the zodiac. It plunges into the ocean to pull out an expanse of blue. It enters museums to reinvent Dutch interiors, still lifes, and portraits. It roams the earth to punctuate and order the