print March 2019

Davina Semo

Davina Semo’s sculptures have an unvarnished quality that can make them tough to love. Of course, she’s well aware of this condition, and based on the evidence of “ALL THE WORLD,” her solo exhibition at Marlborough Contemporary, she’s not much inclined to alter it. The artist’s stated aim is to reflect the present-day urban environment with all its awkward disjunction and waste, so the objects she engineers are supposed to be visually grating. But they come up short—the patina of modish roughness combined with an attempt at a refreshing honesty feels a little too stage-managed for (dis)comfort.

print February 2019

Helen Mirra

“In the context of this exhibition, there will be backwards walkings every morning the week of 5 November.” Those familiar with the oeuvre of Helen Mirra will recognize this odd announcement—appended as a note to the show’s mostly blank press release—as entirely consistent with a life and practice for which the act of walking (backward or otherwise) has long played a crucial role. (On the artist’s website, she dubs herself a “walking experiment.”) For Mirra, as for Stanley Brouwn, Douglas Huebler, and a handful of other artists before her, this routine, while outwardly simple and repetitive,

print January 2019

Olga Chernysheva

City dwellers are able to shield themselves from the hell of other people with little more than a pair of earbuds and a scowl. Their psychic defenses must be honed to perfection, and any opportunity for privacy, however brief or restricted, must be seized without hesitation. Being from Moscow, Olga Chernysheva understands this condition; the artist’s quiet but affecting new paintings and drawings focus on men and women who are at once caught up in the flow of a busy urban center and at pains to detach themselves from it, even as everyone else is doing the same thing.

Chernysheva’s “Autoradio,”

previews January 2019

“GILBERT & GEORGE: THE GREAT EXHIBITION (1971–2016)”

Curated by Daniel Birnbaum and Hans Ulrich Obrist

Subtitled with characteristic modesty—and a nod to the epochal London Expo of 1851—this full-bore touring retrospective samples some five decades of Gilbert & George’s work. Embracing everything from the duo’s earliest forays into their now long-established gridded-and-tinted photo format, such as 1977’s Bent Shit Cunt, to their recent “THE BEARD PICTURES” series, 2015–16, curators Birnbaum and Obrist survey the living sculptures’ factory-like output in the run-up to the 2020 opening of their private museum in London. While reliably

print December 2018

Urs Fischer

For those of us who work in offices, the very sight of a swivel chair can be enough to launch a raft of anxieties. So the sight of nine of them, seemingly gifted with independent life and, worse still, attempting to interact with viewers like something out of Disney’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice (1940), was uniquely alarming. For his installation PLAY, 2018, Urs Fischer worked with artist and choreographer Madeline Hollander—plus a crew of animators and programmers—to produce furniture that wheels around the gallery, responding to body heat and motion in such a way that the viewer and

print November 2018

Glen Fogel

On the day my parents moved out of the London house in which I grew up—I was in my twenties and had already moved away for college, but still thought of it as home—I realized with a jolt that I had precious little documentation of the place. In something close to panic, I grabbed my camcorder and made a rapid, tearful circuit of the place, by then mostly stripped of furniture and other belongings, but still infused with years of memories. I may still have the tape somewhere; I’ve certainly never watched it.

To make the multichannel video With You . . . Me, 2014–18, the centerpiece of

print October 2018

Peter Fischli

“Two different types of glue have been used: wallpaper glue and white wood glue. All sculptures and pedestals have been painted first with a mixture of indoor emulsion paint and champagne chalk. Additional layers of color were applied using acrylic, silicate paint, gouache, or enamel, and in this way a variety of surface effects, patinas, and sculptural looks have been achieved.” The resolutely deadpan style of the press release for Peter Fischli’s debut exhibition here (a version of the show was installed at the gallery’s sister location in Los Angeles earlier this year), with its steadfast

print September 2018

Andreas Slominski

High on the list of a novice art lover’s mistakes must surely be wandering into a Chelsea gallery and asking to use the bathroom. Unfortunately, the portable toilets installed by Andreas Slominski in his recent exhibition at Metro Pictures did not function in the conventional sense—unless some gutsy viewer decided to take a tip from Jackson Pollock, who, during the 1943 unveiling of his commissioned painting Mural, notoriously urinated in Peggy Guggenheim’s fireplace—so a full-bladdered visitor’s needs likely remained unresolved.

Slominski’s fourth exhibition at the gallery suggested a punchy

diary July 06, 2018

Breathe In

“STOP TALKING.”

“Stop talking.”

“No, really, stop talking.”

Unusually for an auctioneer—albeit a very part-time one—White Columns director and chief curator Matthew Higgs isn’t one to raise his voice. And his English wit is sufficiently dry that American ears often have difficulty in distinguishing a genuine word from an ironic one. So it took him a few attempts to convince the crowd at the nonprofit institution’s recent benefit auction that his characteristically affectless request was meant to be taken seriously. Eventually, however, things settled down and bidding on

print Summer 2018

Cyprien Gaillard

“I was born a lo-ser.” Whether indicative of a profound lack of self-esteem or of an unflinching fatalism, this wrenching declaration loops throughout the first three acts of Cyprien Gaillard’s 3-D film Nightlife, which made its American debut at Gladstone Gallery this spring. (It was first released in Europe in 2015.) Sampled from Alton Ellis’s 1969 rocksteady single “Blackman’s Word,” which itself sampled the line from Derrick Harriott’s 1967 track “The Loser,” the keening vocal is immersed in a fuzzy dub pulse that makes for a suitably hypnotic accompaniment to the film’s oneiric visuals. In

diary May 15, 2018

Bad Madeleines

IN ELEMENTARY SCHOOL (primary school to this Brit), when candy was currency, anyone who showed up with some new or unusual confection ruled the roost—at least until the prize was shared, stickily, among a dozen instant mates or wolfed down defensively by its owner. So it was particularly impressive when a classmate arrived one Monday morning with three never-before-seen treats. The brands were familiar, but the bars themselves were prototypes—experimental trial runs for yet-to-be-released products. To our sugar-addled minds, they were gold. The source of the bounty? A parent’s visit to a food

picks April 27, 2018

Anne Collier

Jerry: “What is this salty discharge?”

Elaine: “Oh my god, you’re crying.”

Jerry: “This is horrible. I care!”

Jerry Seinfeld’s puzzlement at his own tears in this snippet from his “show about nothing” offers a reminder that crying is still too often dismissed as a feminine weakness, a marker of emotional release that men are supposed to find embarrassing. In the midcentury romance comics that Anne Collier excerpts in her new photographic series, “Crying (Comic)” and “Tears (Comic)” (both 2018), we understand with very little context that the “salty discharge” depicted comes from the eye of a

diary April 13, 2018

The Mori the Merrier

I’M NOT JAPANESE, but I am from a country—England—where drinking tea is a daily given (“I’ll put the kettle on” follows “Hello” like night follows day). And having grown up in a household where teabags were considered infra dig (it was leaf Earl Grey or nothing), I possess a great deal of sympathy for the idea of turning a simple infusion into a ceremony. So while the closest I usually get to a ritualized procedure may be warming the pot, it makes complete sense to me that something possessed of such restorative power should be treated with veneration. It was with some satisfaction then that I

print February 2018

Adriana Lara

CARBON; FIRE; GAS; NOISE; SILENCE; PLASTIC; DIET COKE; DEBRIS; PRODUCT; ALLUMINUM [sic]; INFORMATION; COPY; MARKETING; TRASH; VOICES; BURPS; RECORDINGS; RADIO; CC; FORM-EXFORM; THEORIES; POST-PUNK-POST-PRODUCT; STRATEGIC UNPREDICTABILITY; BORDER-MEXICO-U.S. In the lead-up to her third solo exhibition at Greenspon, Mexico City-based Adriana Lara supplied this dizzying end-times vocab list to half a dozen writers as fuel for a series of original conspiracy theories, making the (suitably paranoid) results available in the gallery as simple printed handouts. As well as providing rich inspiration,

print November 2017

Cheyney Thompson

In the unforgiving hands of Cheyney Thompson, painting is subject to a deconstruction so thoroughgoing and severe that it might better be termed a disembowelment. Having broken the medium down into its constituent parts, Thompson doesn’t so much reassemble it as transport it into other realms entirely, to fields governed by systems and routines more often associated with such divergent realms as mathematics, economics, and manual labor. “Somewhere Some Pictures Sometimes,” the deliberately nebulous title of the artist’s seventh solo exhibition at this gallery, was consistent with the teasingly

print October 2017

Tim Youd

In Stanley Kubrick’s much-deconstructed ur-horror film The Shining (1980), conclusive evidence of protagonist Jack Torrance’s psychopathy appears tucked into the wayward winter caretaker’s typewriter. Upon finding it, his long-suffering wife, Wendy, begins to page through a stack of similar typewritten pages nearby. To her despair, she finds the sheaf of papers previously assumed to contain Torrance’s novel in progress to contain endless repetitions of the same self-mocking maxim: “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” The phrase is typed in a variety of decorative configurations, as if

print September 2017

Ceal Floyer

Ceal Floyer shares with a handful of her contemporaries, such as Martin Creed and Gavin Turk—all three emerged in London during the early 1990s heyday of the YBAs—a wry post-Conceptualist mode that edges consciously ever closer to non-art, to simply merging with the fabric of everyday life. But while Creed has inherited the interest of the original Conceptualist tendency toward systems and ritual, and Turk the movement’s preoccupation with questions of authorship, Floyer leans in a more programmatically minimal direction. In her fourth appearance at this gallery, the artist continued

print Summer 2017

Evan Holloway

Still indelibly associated with Los Angeles, sculptor Evan Holloway broke through in the late 1990s by combining high-modernist form with subcultural and mundane imagery, manifesting a nimble strand of post-Pop that revealed the clear influence of his former teacher Charles Ray. But while Holloway’s artistic lineage is readily apparent, a certain lightness of touch continues to set him apart from his predecessors and extend his influence beyond the West Coast. Holloway is that rare artist who can address the state of the natural world without preaching, and the condition of the built environment

print May 2017

Vik Muniz

It’s no great challenge to name recent exhibitions in New York that have drawn their power from expert illusionism. One featuring Vija Celmins’s obsessive conjurings of the night sky and ocean surface, for example, coincided with another presenting Matt Johnson’s painted carved-wood simulacra of packaging materials and studio detritus. Our appetite for near-exact copies of extant objects and images—from the sublime to the banal—appears as powerful as ever. Vik Muniz is an artist for whom precise representation has long been important as both strategy and theme, specifically as a way

diary April 05, 2017

Play Ball

ANNE PASTERNAK’S FIRST COUPLE OF YEARS as director of the Brooklyn Museum have been interesting ones, though not always in the sense she might have preferred. A few short months into her tenure, the firebrand former head of Creative Time caught heat from protesters for renting out the space to the Sixth Annual Brooklyn Real Estate Summit. It was a decision they saw—with some justification—as incompatible with the institution’s commitment to local audiences in a quickly gentrifying neighborhood. Following intense negotiation, another event, the Brooklyn Community Forum on Anti-Gentrification and

Michael Wilson