Maximiliane Leuschner

  • View of “Direction, Direction?”, 2023.
    picks May 11, 2023

    Ndayé Kouagou

    Ndayé Kouagou’s exhibition “Direction, Direction?” is part inner monologue, part influencer-speak. The artist riffs on our tendency to overthink decision-making and to embrace superstition (tarot readings, flipping coins) to predict the future.

    Central to the exhibition is the film A coin is a coin, 2022, which is set in a production studio with two light tripods framing the scene. The artist, clad in a dynamically proportioned yellow-and-gray suit, takes on a nonbinary identity to blur possible boundaries and deflect attention from any linear or binary influences that could thwart the decision-making

  • View of “Insomnia,” 2022. Photo: Rosie Taylor.
    picks January 16, 2023

    Leah Clements

    Imagine a deserted waiting room. A functional Selman Selmanagić chair upholstered in midnight blue rests forlornly in a corner, while translucent curtains cascade onto the velvety sapphire-colored carpet. Grainy photographs—shown for the first time—line the walls like portals to another dimension.

    The veils are thin in “INSOMNIA.” Compiled as a psychogeographic atlas, Leah Clements’s exhibition of photographs commune with the spectral side of our domestic lives. The images record various forms of paranormal patterns, from what looks like horizontal water ripples on bathroom tiles (both Subsolar

  • View of “Nina Katchadourian,” 2022. From left: Whale, 2020; Douglas’s Painting, 2022.
    print November 2022

    Nina Katchadourian

    Back in 2020, as the world came to a standstill, Nina Katchadourian revisited Dougal Robertson’s Survive the Savage Sea. Based on a true story, the 1973 bestseller recounts the adventures of a Scottish family who survived thirty-eight days adrift on a dinghy in the Pacific Ocean, following an attack by orca whales that sank their wooden schooner, the Lucette. Fascinated by this story since the age of seven, Katchadourian connected with the author’s eldest son, Douglas Robertson, to reconstruct the events of June 15 to July 22, 1972. She did so via daily text messages and phone conversations over

  • View of “If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place.”
    picks October 20, 2022

    Ella Littwitz

    Drawn to invisible markers of place and territory, Ella Littwitz meditates on man-made borders and nature’s undoing of them, with a specific focus on her native Israel and the West Bank. For “If everything that exists has a place, place too will have a place,” her second solo show at Copperfield, the Haifa-born artist has constructed her own “facts on the ground”—a diplomatic parlance that arose amid the expansion of Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank in the 1970s. Following laborious negotiations with Israeli border patrol, Littwitz retrieved flotation buoys from the Great Rift

  • Steph Huang, Tannakin Skinker, 2022, MDF, chemiwood, mild steel, paint, chain, arduino system, perspex, 58 1/4 × 23 5/8 × 18 7/8".
    picks July 25, 2022

    Steph Huang

    “A Great Increase In Business Is On Its Way” is a palatable tale of food and fortune. Its narrator, Steph Huang, a chef and artist hailing from Taiwan, has brought bustling markets and restaurants into the Bridget Riley Gallery of London’s Goldsmiths CCA. Reminiscent of Émile Zola’s 1883 novel Au Bonheur des Dames (The Ladies’ Paradise), which likened department stores to places of worship, Huang has created a sumptuous sanctuary adorned with delicious little offerings for gourmets, bon viveurs, and other aficionados of momentary pleasures. A hint of cardamom—the queen of spices—emanates from

  • Black-and-white photographs documenting Rosemarie Castoro’s Atoll performance from the “Streetworks II” series, 1969.
    picks May 09, 2022

    Rosemarie Castoro

    Polaroids show Rosemarie Castoro in action. Some depict the artist lunging playfully, like a belligerent rodent, among the forty-two wooden stakes of her Beaver’s Trap, 1977, or resting sphinxlike below “exoskeletal auras” (Two-Play Tunnel, 1974). In another image, the self-styled “paintersculptor” dangles from a harness attached to her studio ceiling, performing balletic contortions in front of her abstract Symphony canvas from 1970. There is, however, little of this vivacity in “Working Out,” her UK debut. Despite its dynamic title—borrowed from a 1975 essay on Castoro written by Lucy R.

  • View of “The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction),” 2022.
    picks March 24, 2022

    Mike Nelson

    For “The Book of Spells, (a speculative fiction),” Mike Nelson has imagined a bedsit replete with a dangling iron lamp, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves stacked with countless travel guidebooks, and a sage-green bedframe with a saggy oriental rug as a mattress in its center. A jar filled with wood splinters and a wishbone—tokens of good fortune—have been dispersed throughout, alongside travel money and a gemstone paperweight. Rubble, a wilted orange squash, a discarded VHS tape, and a deflated basketball complete the British artist’s alchemic configuration on Webster Road, his sixth with the gallery.