Nico Israel

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  previews January 2009

  “The Shadow”

  Who knows what darkness lurks within the heart of art from the Renaissance through the present day? “The Shadow” knows.

  Who knows what darkness lurks within the heart of art from the Renaissance through the present day? “The Shadow” knows. This exhibition—curated by Romanian-born German art historian Victor Stoichita (who penned an intriguing book on the topic a decade ago)—brings together some 140 works in two venues and explores shifting representations of shadows. The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza will offer a survey of paintings ranging from Jan van Eyck and Rembrandt to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, some of which have been culled from the museum’s collection (with its own shadowy

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  previews January 2008

  Cai Guo-Qiang

  Feng shui, dragons, herbal medicine, and, most memorably, gunpowder: Fujian-born, New York–based artist Cai Guo-Qiang has been plying such traditional Chinese exports along the global biennial Silk Road, and supercharging them with shamanic bravado, since just before the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989. Bringing together some sixty paintings, drawings, videos, and site-specific installations— accompanied by a catalogue featuring essays by, among others, David Joselit and Miwon Kwon—this retrospective, the first for a Chinese artist in Frank

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  print October 2006

  BORDER CROSSINGS: A PORTFOLIO BY YTO BARRADA

  GIBRALTAR, THE OCEANIC STRAIT that forms a narrow passageway between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, has long been a microcosm of the world’s major geopolitical conflicts, as the cultures it both separates and holds in uneasy proximity have vied for control of its waters and the surrounding territories. Among those who have claimed dominion are the Arabs, who named the two-and-a-half-square-mile rock that creates the strait Gibel Tariq, after the eighth-century general whose military victory paved the way for the taking of Al Andalus; the Spanish, whose fifteenth-century reconquista led to

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  print September 2005

  Neo Rauch

  Neo Rauch’s latest suite of untimely painterly meditations is called “Renegaten,” a word that is similar to the English “renegades” but which also preserves a bit more tenaciously the idea of “reneging” on a promise or commitment. The title aptly expresses a tension in Rauch’s work between a bold iconoclasm that exposes the fallaciousness of figurative painting itself and a broody melancholia that confronts the broken promise of art to represent or transform life, a promise that demands restitution.

  By now, Leipzig’s Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst’s prize pupil’s signature style is well

• previews September 2005

  T1 Turin Triennial of Contemporary Art

  Rabelais’s grotesque, voracious giant always on the move supplies a model for contemporary globalization in “The Pantagruel Syndrome,” the title of Turin’s first triennial. T1—the abbreviation seems to draw inspiration from Schwarzenegger’s Terminator films (Gov. Arnold as today’s Pantagruel?)—is organized in two parts. The first shows new work by seventy-five young artists (like Trisha Donnelly, Christian Jankowski, and Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla); the focus here is on information, with ten cocurators serving as “correspondents”

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  print May 2005

  “InSite_05”

  THIRTEEN YEARS AFTER ITS BALLYHOOED emergence in San Diego and Tijuana, “inSite” is approaching art-world adolescence and, like many confused, hormone-addled young adults, finds itself experiencing both a growth spurt and something of an identity crisis. The binational, collaborative-oriented art exhibition’s first appearance in 1992 occurred in an era of massive political transformations on a global scale: Walls everywhere seemed to be tumbling down. Accordingly, on the academic front, there was a theoretical fascination with “borders,” migration, and hybridities of all sorts and, in art-world

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  print March 2005

  Lisa Sigal

  Lisa Sigal’s installations lean left. They also lean right, forward, and backward, and extend out from freestanding painted sheets of wood, Masonite, drywall, insulation board, cardboard, vellum, and paper onto gallery walls, at times jutting into and out of those walls as though in homage to Gordon Matta-Clark’s cutouts. Unlike any number of recent artists who deploy color primarily in order to highlight three-dimensional form, Sigal seems equally invested in painting and sculpture. Her works combine the delicacy and skill of Monique Prieto’s canvases with the elemental architectural impulse

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  previews January 2005

  First Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art

  Under a nebulous Hegelio-Adornian banner, “Dialectics of Hope” aspires to “reintegrate contemporary Russian art into the international art world” by joining the biennial parade. The six curators, each with high-profile experience, introduce some forty artists to a Moscow audience. The smaller Russian contingent may attract the tourists that the curators are counting on to flock to Moscow in the middle of winter.

  The specter of yet another biennial is haunting Europe. Under a nebulous Hegelio-Adornian banner, “Dialectics of Hope” aspires to “reintegrate contemporary Russian art into the international art world” by joining the biennial parade. The six curators, each with high-profile experience (Manifesta, Sao Paulo, Venice, etc.), introduce some forty artists, including such putatively hope-full international participants as Jeremy Deller and John Bock, to a Moscow audience. The smaller Russian and “nonconformist” Soviet

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  print January 2005

  On Kawara

  In 1954, when he was barely 7,500 days old, On Kawara exhibited, in Tokyo, a series of drawings of scarred, dismembered bodies. Coming only two years after US-imposed censorship laws were lifted in Japan and a mere nine after the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, the drawings—empathetic, dramatic, grotesque—were everything that Kawara’s later Conceptualist work is, apparently, not.

  The nebulous link between Kawara’s early and mature work, often thought of as unexpressive and detached, was clarified in “Paintings of 40 Years,” even though the show contained only the latter. Three panels hung alone

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  print December 2004

  Shimon Attie

  Over a decade ago, Shimon Attie made a splash with several series of color photographs depicting buildings in Berlin (and, later, other German and European cities) onto which he projected archival black-and-white photographs of those same neighborhoods in an earlier era, restoring, in ghostly form, their once-active Jewish populations. Those works, made in cities then undergoing massive social change, seemed aimed at asserting the importance of remembering extinguished populations, while also demonstrating how cities and buildings—and by extension cultures—forget or ignore their pasts.

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  print November 2004

  Phoebe Washburn

  Phoebe Washburn’s undulating, room-sized sculptural installation, Nothing’s Cutie, 2004, looks at first like a colorful topographic model of a densely populated futuristic urban metropolis plunked down on a desert island: Rio meets Las Vegas meets Cancun, or maybe Kuala Lumpur. Hundreds of vertically inclined wooden planks of different lengths and dimensions, each briskly handpainted a pastel hue, have been screwed together, forming clusters (or neighborhoods) that open into little clearings of sawdust. Daintily punctuated with unsharpened pencils, packing tape, thumbtacks, and other stuff

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  previews September 2004

  26th Bienal de São Paulo

  Under the swashbuckling banner “Free Territory,” the latest edition of the granddaddy of Southern Hemisphere biennials features the work of 142 artists from sixty countries in its massive Niemeyer-designed space.

  Under the swashbuckling banner “Free Territory,” the latest edition of the granddaddy of Southern Hemisphere biennials features the work of 142 artists from sixty countries in its massive Niemeyer-designed space. German-born Alfons Hug, who also curated the Bienal’s timid 2002 installment, now proposes the theme of the “no-man’s-land,” described as a “power-free zone,” a land of “emptiness, of silence and respite, where the frenzy that surrounds us” is brought to a momentary standstill. Biennial regulars Julie Mehretu, Jorge Pardo, Santiago Sierra, and Neo Rauch operating in a “power-free” zone?