Mitchell Anderson

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  picks March 06, 2023

  Gabriele Garavaglia

  Going up or down? The question might evoke eschatological anxiety or simply another day in the office. Gabriele Garavaglia’s “Liftcore” deploys the motif of the elevator to heighten the surreality of the banal, arriving finally at a vertiginous kind of stasis. The Museum im Bellpark, a century-old suburban villa, contains four elevator frontispieces that range from Hell Door, all works 2023, in standard skyscraper steel, to Amnesia, a Cor-Ten dovetailed monstrosity looking straight out of David Fincher’s Alien 3. Each is hung flush so that their categorization as art object or set design lies

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  picks October 04, 2022

  Cassidy Toner

  A year after Simone Biles’s and Naomi Osaka’s bold withdrawals and reports of a Great Resignation, the social contract defining success continues to be unsteadily renegotiated. Enter Cassidy Toner’s “Subverting expectations with bad humor and mediocre output,” which, by enacting its title, cannily reframes anti-ambition as an art of survival. A 114-foot metal garland wraps the exhibition, reminiscent of the middling kitsch of an earlier Cold War. Morning glories nestled among its leaves suggest nature spending beauty early and loads blown too soon, while the title, In loving memory of Haru Urara

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  picks September 21, 2021

  Steven Shearer

  A portrait is always a paradox of power. The depicted and the depictor; embedded Ozymandias truth or propagandistic lies. Much recent figurative painting has sought, admirably but with some obviousness, to invert and destroy the genre’s entrenched hierarchies. More subtle is Steven Shearer’s examination of portraiture through the lens of those who construct and consume it. The fourteen oils on view in “Working from Life” each depict a solitary artist, collector, or classical bust. They are layered in their prisms of lurid color emanating like gemstone fire and in the dynamics of power they assess

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  picks June 03, 2020

  Jan Vorisek

  Jan Vorisek often mobilizes the aesthetics of his work as a DJ and promoter in his performances and static ouptut. In this exhibition, “Collapse Poem,” the artist offers zones of security and release with dual room-filling installations that are related like the techno cousins Berghain and Lab.Oratory. Devotion Strategy (all works cited, 2020) is a slick black inflatable labyrinth that fills the ground-floor gallery. The tight corridors and thick smell of plasticized barriers elicit both fear and a desire for an undistanced encounter. A rear resection in this fetish bouncy castle reveals Exercise