previews January 2005

Landscape Confection

The Wexner has aptly billed “Landscape Confection” as “whimsical and vividly colorful,” but with artists like Kori Newkirk, Michael Raedecker, and Lisa Sanditz in the mix, the show also promises some slightly unsettling moments. About fifty works by thirteen artists relate, in varying degrees of representation, to the landscape.

The Wexner has aptly billed “Landscape Confection” as “whimsical and vividly colorful,” but with artists like Kori Newkirk, Michael Raedecker, and Lisa Sanditz in the mix, the show also promises some slightly unsettling moments. About fifty works by thirteen artists—including Pia Fries's bright, topographical abstractions and Rowena Dring's stitched-by-numbers “paintings”—relate, in varying degrees of representation, to the landscape. All evidence the allure and durability of this ancient subject. The catalogue features an essay by Helen Molesworth and entries

print December 2004

Atsuko Tanaka

“Make it new” was the mandate of Gutaï, a pioneering collective in postwar Japan. The dictum was realized emphatically in many of the group’s performance works, such as Kazuo Shiraga’s Challenge to the Mud, 1955, in which the artist writhed in a pile of slop, creating a constantly shifting live informe sculpture that made Pollock’s rhythmic pouring and dripping seem positively genteel. In another radical act, Atsuko Tanaka donned a potentially dangerous costume of tangled cords and brightly painted incandescent bulbs that lit up with the flick of a switch. Like Shiraga’s mud encounter, Electric

print November 2004

Amedeo Modigliani

After decades of revisionist art history, with its accompanying tendency to downplay the significance of biography, it’s hard to believe that the oeuvre of Amedeo Modigliani remains colored by accounts of personal tragedy. Perhaps the most famous of the Montparnasse peintres maudits, Modigliani’s life story is familiar enough: Impoverished, itinerant, tubercular but handsome, the artist was frequently under the influence of alcohol and drugs, sketched café clients for money, and died at the age of thirty-five (an event immediately followed by the suicide of his pregnant girlfriend and last muse,

previews September 2004

E.V. Day

For her taut and tart sculptural work, E.V. Day has taken women’s undergarments off the body and into the realm of art.

For her taut and tart sculptural work, E.V. Day has taken women’s undergarments off the body and into the realm of art. Stretching nylon and silk both physically and conceptually, she’s used thongs and G-strings to create formations suggestive of jet planes or birds, employed crotchless panties and chicken eggs in a reproductive allegory, and made her own version of Winged Victory from monofil-ament and a shredded red sequined dress. Do these works “suggest the possibility of an active female pleas-ure,” as the press release claims? Viewers can draw their own conclusion from a new commission

previews September 2004

Shahzia Sikander

Pakistan-born Shahzia Sikander re-interprets the tradition of Mughal miniature painting for a contemporary eye, fluidly combining Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and American pop-cultural iconography within a single image.

Pakistan-born Shahzia Sikander re-interprets the tradition of Mughal miniature painting for a contemporary eye, fluidly combining Christian, Hindu, Muslim, and American pop-cultural iconography within a single image. Her jewel-like paintings and drawings and deft fusion of cultural and visual elements make for an arresting body of work; but more than that, Sikander puts relevance and meaning back into shopworn "multiculturalism.” The second half of an exhibition that appeared at Skidmore College’s Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery earlier this year, this show features fifty new works on paper,

print September 2004

Erick Swenson

At least since his 1998 show at Dallas’s Angstrom Gallery, Erick Swenson has pursued a level of presentation and craftsmanship so exacting that it might attract phone calls equally from museum curators and from Hollywood special-effects technicians. Titled “Obviously a Movie,” the Angstrom show consisted of sculpted creatures, including a creepy half-horse, half-sheep called Edgar, 1997, that stood upright and two green-faced ape-men set in action poses among snow-covered rocks, all dusted with artificial snow. Making no secret of their artifice and sources, Swenson’s hybrid forms appear almost

print Summer 2004

Cheyney Thompson

One might not guess that one of Louisiana-born, New York–based artist Cheyney Thompson’s inspirations is Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. But, starting with his 2002 exhibition “1 Scenario + 1 Situation,” also at this gallery, the artist has hoped that viewers might respond to his series of small paintings of building materials as they once did to the contemplative boy building a house of cards. With his carefully realized depictions of bricks and two-by-fours floating alone or in elegant yet uncategorizable combinations, Thompson wants to spur the viewer toward a moment of crystal-clear apprehension

previews May 2004

Kai Althoff

Tormented, sweet, angry, expressionistic, nostalgic, utterly contemporary—Kai Althoff’s eclectic artwork is all that and more.

Tormented, sweet, angry, expressionistic, nostalgic, utterly contemporary—Kai Althoff’s eclectic artwork is all that and more. The Cologne-based artist is known on American shores mostly for watercolors and oils that evoke nineteenth-century German history, folklore, and Biedermeier genre scenes or, in darker moments, the baleful narratives of George Grosz. But Althoff’s first survey at a US museum includes over 140 works in a range of media from the past twenty-five years: paintings, photography, works on paper, installations, and videos, as well as audio presentation

print April 2004

LAYING IT ON THICK: THE ART OF DANA SCHUTZ

AS A PAINTER WHO IS ADVANCING ON THE SHEER FORCE OF ECSTATIC IMAGINATION, ideation, and subjective color, Dana Schutz just might be our finest contemporary symbolist. In the simplest terms, Schutz gives form to things that do not exist outside of art, and her paintings would seem to avail themselves of the artist’s right—so eloquently articulated in Gabriel-Albert Aurier’s celebrated 1891 essay “Symbolism in Painting: Paul Gauguin”—to exaggerate, attenuate, or deform an object’s qualities not merely in furtherance of his individual vision but in service of the “needs of the Idea to be expressed.”

print April 2004

William Pope.L

Over the course of two decades of confrontational performance work, William Pope.L has used his body to probe race, desire, endurance, and deprivation. Once you see one of his projects, you’re not likely to forget it—although it’s possible you might not recognize it as art. For Tompkins Square Crawl, 1991, the artist, dressed in a business suit and awkwardly holding a tiny flowerpot, laboriously crawled on his stomach around the East Village park. (The sight of a black man intentionally lying in the gutter confused and enraged one onlooker so much that he called the police.) Skewering everything

print April 2004

Manny Farber

Manny Farber’s paintings are often written about in the context of his seminal film criticism, as if the significance and iconoclasm of his output in one medium is necessarily related to his equally inimitable production in another. But familiarity with his essays, which were published from the ’40s to the mid-’70s (a collection of the writing was reissued in 1998), is not required to get caught up in Farber’s art. The fact is, before the writing or the painting came the looking, and Farber looks and sees like nobody else. This is amply clear in “About Face,” a career overview of the

print February 2004

Dan Fischer

Dan Fischer’s art of homage and appropriation reveals its maker as both passionate fan and savvy practitioner. Well-known photographs of artists and artworks are the originals for Fischer’s detailed graphite-on-paper copies; his recent show included dozens of variations on twentieth-century portraiture, including Cindy Sherman in an untitled film still; Piero Manzoni grinning and holding a can of Artist’s Shit; Robert Gober nearly unrecognizable in a wedding gown; Piet Mondrian in his tidy smock calmly regarding a grid painting; and Jean-Michel Basquiat sitting on one of his crate constructions.

Meghan Dailey