Max L. Feldman

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  picks March 11, 2020

  Jenna Bliss

  At first glance, the eleven photographs and five light boxes in Jenna Bliss’s “Late Responder” resemble images from America’s Gilded Age: brand-new skyscrapers towering over stern-faced, vaguely puritanical folk. In Western Union #2 (all works cited, 2020), a figure sits with his head bowed and hands clasped, evoking the pose of a devout parishioner, or perhaps that of a watchmaker hunched over delicate handiwork. On closer inspection, viewers will see that the subject is a gloomy contemporary looking down at his smartphone; the logo of the former telegram service company suffuses softly from

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  picks June 26, 2018

  Iza Tarasewicz

  There’s something almost brash about the gorgeousness of Polish sculptor Iza Tarasewicz’s rusted steel, copper, and brass constructions. In this exhibition, “In myriads, things cry out,” numbered forms suggest foliage from, or ornaments for, a fantastical garden. Seemingly left to grow wild, they’ve sprouted their own ecosystem while adapting to artificial surroundings. Dangling from the ceiling and walls from the artist’s characteristic networks of hooked tubes and tangled wire, each nameless detail is in harmony with the whole.

  In the main gallery space, rows of five thin hexagonal structures

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  picks March 14, 2018

  Francesca Woodman

  Nestled in nonchronological clusters, this precious collection of photographs captures how Francesca Woodman rearranged classical sculpture’s erotic promise to suit the eerie tone of Victorian portrait photography. For the ancient Greeks, the body was the outer expression of inner virtue; in Woodman’s rituals of exposure, it provides a richer, troubling vision of our interior lives. Both Easter Lilies, 1976, and Girl with Weed, 1980, contrast a proud, naked torso with plants, reminding us that sexuality is a cultural construct built by an impenetrable wall of repression. She meets this legacy

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  picks December 18, 2017

  Sophie Reinhold

  Surpassing her previous exhibitions’ somber-toned geometricism, “Exchange of Vacuums” marks Berliner Sophie Reinhold’s progress, with an expanded painterly vocabulary of reenergized brushstrokes and grimier color combinations that neither sacrifice nor restate her earlier works’ stately tenor. The best works here, including two untitled pieces from 2016 and 2017, are explorations of the space between murky figuration and dramatic abstraction, primordial in subject but radically modern in form. In the 2016 piece, horizontal strips of white tape produce a square space barely discernible through

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  picks October 23, 2017

  “Threads Left Dangling, Veiled in Ink”

  This exhibition, curated by Béatrice Gross, assesses the relationship between text and image in contemporary art. The mysterious collective Slavs and Tatars’ Eurasian patterns, Ellie Ga’s video archaeology, Robert Stadler’s sculptural curiosities, and Erica Baum and Julien Bismuth’s photographs are just some of the works that come together to reflect multiple historical, cultural, and linguistic interactions untroubled by the pieces’ ineradicable traces of difference.

  Slavs and Tatars’ four-piece fabric-and-paper series “The Inrising,” 2017, features glorious mythical phoenixes parading across

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  picks May 07, 2017

  Eduard Angeli

  Silent space is the dominant theme in this retrospective of paintings by Austrian artist Eduard Angeli. In works from his early desertscapes—For a Great Purpose, 1973, and Fire, 1977—to his cityscapes of the late 1990s, he invites us to see the incessant loneliness of silence on a grand scale. Angeli gradually abandoned human figures and nature (deserts, grasslands, mountains) for strict geometric forms (concrete or stone constructions), and bright pastel shades for crumbling muted tones, all the possibilities represented by the desert horizon for a pervasive sense of dread.

  The grim housing