print January 2017

Dena Yago

The four photographs displayed in Dena Yago’s recent show “Heck & The Divested Set” were shot by the artist in Pioneertown, a fake western frontier outpost conceived and built by Hollywood investors and production designers in the 1940s to serve as both a TV/film set and temporary housing for actors and crew members. A rusty town bell atop a wooden facade in Pioneertown, 2015 (Bell); a close-up of a brittle leather saddle in Pioneertown, 2015 (Saddle); a rickety wagon, long abandoned, in Pioneertown, 2015 (Wheel); and a slouching windmill with faded signage in Pioneertown, 2015 (Windmill) (all

picks December 01, 2011

Phil Collins, Boris Mikhailov, Abraham Cruzvillegas

Disclaimer: After a decade of far too many address changes and long-haul flights (all for the sake of art), 2011 was the year I finally decided to just stay home and write, only venturing out on rare occasions to destinations of reasonable proximity. The year started off exceptionally well with Phil Collins’s London premiere of marxism today (prologue) and use! value! exchange!, both 2010, at the BFI Gallery. Sadly, this was the gallery’s last exhibition before its permanent closure due to budget cuts brought on by the financial crisis, though the space’s termination provided an appropriate

print September 2011

Boris Mikhailov

For more than four decades, Boris Mikhailov has photographed the shifting visual landscape of his native Ukraine, utilizing a range of formal approaches while never fully abandoning the spontaneous, amateur quality of what initially began as a hobby. (He was fired from an engineering job in the late 1960s, when the KGB discovered nude photographs he’d taken of his wife.) In his recent exhibition at Galerie Barbara Weiss—inaugurating the gallery’s impeccable new venue in Kreuzberg—the artist presented two series of works, “Black Archive,” 1968–79, and “Tea Coffee Cappuccino,” 2000–10,

print Summer 2011

Per Billgren and Leigh Ledare

“Something Might Have Been Better Than Nothing . . .” was the suggestive title of a two-person exhibition by Per Billgren and Leigh Ledare, childhood friends from Seattle and former art school classmates at Columbia University. It sounds like an oblique reference to the detritus of adolescent yearning (or its nostalgic sublimation) inhabiting the portraits and landscapes of a shared biography. Ledare, thrust into the spotlight several years ago with a racy body of work (photographs, videos, and the 2008 book Pretend You’re Actually Alive) that perversely complied with his ex-ballerina/ex-model

picks May 23, 2011

Armando Andrade Tudela

In Armando Andrade Tudela’s latest exhibition, “Alto sorto sopra” (Rising High Above), two sculptural installations inhabit the far left corner of the gallery’s rectangular subterranean space, with the second of these wedged between a column and two radiators jutting out from the wall. The latter is Gris #1 (Gray #1), 2011, a wooden structure that resembles a long, smooth pallet wrapped in thick plastic—so that it appears blurry—and placed on a very graphic (almost elegant) tapestry featuring marijuana leaves. In Gris #2, 2011, a pair of thin metal structures that look like flimsy versions of

print February 2011

Elisabeth Neudörfl

In a text describing the methodologies and conceptual concerns that comprise her “topographic” approach to documentary photography, Elisabeth Neudörfl has written that “a fundamental strategy of photography is exclusion.” With its high-contrast black-and-white images of housing blocks and the neglected green areas and dead spaces that border them, the artist’s recent series “Habitat,” 2010, documents—from varying distances and angles—those elements that make up an unidentified residential area, while intentionally denying a representational cohesion or narrative logic. The immediate

previews January 2011

Haegue Yang: Arrivals

Haegue Yang’s prolific output during the past decade encompasses a broad range of media, but the Korean-born artist is perhaps best known for her venetian-blind installations, which utilize ambient lighting, scent emitters, and heating and cooling elements to create multisensory experiences conveying political narratives through the language of formal abstraction.

Haegue Yang’s prolific output during the past decade encompasses a broad range of media, but the Korean-born artist is perhaps best known for her venetian-blind installations, which utilize ambient lighting, scent emitters, and heating and cooling elements to create multisensory experiences conveying political narratives through the language of formal abstraction. “Arrivals,” her largest and most ambitious show to date, features a generous selection of older works as well as newly commissioned installations, including a massive venetian-blind piece

print December 2010

Anna Oppermann

“Somewhere in this world, complexity must still be valued.” Anna Oppermann (1940–1993) wrote these words midway through a brief yet prolific career during which she endured the disdain of many critics perplexed by the large, unruly installations she called “ensembles.” Consisting of hundreds of photographs, drawings, annotations, found objects, and scraps of paper, these works, meant to change every time they are shown, seem to unflinchingly portray an obsessive impulse to accumulate words and images in a chaotic and hermetic manner. But despite a position of relative marginality—partly due to

print October 2010

Vasco Araújo and Javier Téllez

“Mais que a vida” (Larger than Life) was an ambitious exhibition (traveling to Spain’s Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, where it is on view through January 9, 2011) that surveyed the prolific trajectories of Portuguese artist Vasco Araújo and New York– and Berlin-based Venezuelan artist Javier Téllez, with works that shared a penchant for literary, cinematic, and autobiographical references. Trained as an opera singer, Araújo takes the language of melodrama to a point of excess that is both playful and melancholic, while Téllez’s collaborations with mental patients and other marginalized

print September 2010

Annika Eriksson

In Annika Eriksson’s recent exhibition “Wir sind wieder da” (We’re Back), a digitized 16-mm film loop showed a nocturnal scene of a group of punks casually conversing and drinking beer in a vacant lot filled with makeshift furniture: abandoned couches, wooden pallets, a grocery cart. The set is artificially lit, and puffs from an off-camera smoke machine periodically turn the image a deep blue as they waft over the scene, distorting the depth of field and conferring an oddly painterly and immobile quality upon the tableau. Projected on a large screen mounted on a metal scaffold, the film faced

print Summer 2010

Rineke Dijkstra

For nearly two decades, Rineke Dijkstra has used frontal photographic portraiture to register the unrehearsed innocence, inhibition, and insecurity that mark the difficult and often tragicomic transition from adolescence to maturity. “Liverpool” presented new photographic and video work produced during the 2008–2009 Tate Liverpool exhibition “The Fifth Floor: Ideas Taking Space,” which provided the artist with a functional studio setup within the museum, much like the temporary studios she had constructed to isolate and film pubescent clubbers for her earlier work The Buzzclub, Liverpool,

print May 2010

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri

Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri have cited Fluxus artist Robert Filliou in his assertion that “art is what makes life more interesting than art” since initiating their collaboration in 1999. The two artists (who also maintain individual practices) consistently seek to fulfill this maxim, entertaining the possibility of a compelling and committed aesthetic practice that might adequately respond to the magnitude of historical events. In so doing, they have eluded conventional categories such as cultural activism or political engagement, using poetic disruptions and fragmentary discursive elements

Michèle Faguet