Nico Israel

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  print October 1996

  Diti Almog

  “Look at it this way,” Diti Almog’s meticulously rendered paintings seemed to want to say, the “it” in question being the painted work, adjacent downsized or oversized “copies” of that work’s component parts, and the gallery space that contains all of the above. The Israeli artist presented near-pristine white wood panels punctuated by horizontal or vertical stripes or boxes of various colors, while also re-presenting details of the same painting in scaled-up or -down versions. This act of repetition and self-appropriation blurred distinctions—between part and whole, inside and outside, original

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  print September 1996

  Michel François

  At first glance, Michel François’ recent exhibition resembled the playroom of an affluent child blessed with an unusual collection of oversized toys. Shiny objects hung from the ceiling, and cushiony surfaces were spread along the ground. Large video monitors sat on the floor in both rooms of the gallery space, while two gigantic, almost Oldenbergian spoons leaned against a wall. Yet if the show as a whole initially seemed to offer a kind of youthful, if precious, fun, on closer inspection the works that comprised it circumscribed the limits of play. Just as an overprotective parent reins in a

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  print March 1996

  Tony Feher

  What might it mean to bear witness to the trivial, to personalize detritus, to transform the utterly generic into a kind of miniature theme park of memory? Displaying a lyricism that borders on the narcissistic, Tony Feher’s floored, piled, and scattered arrangements of both useless and once-useful quotidian objects—jars, packing materials, bits of lumber, and the like—monumentalized the apparently banal, suggesting that even the most commonplace items can be suffused with personal significance.

  On the one hand, Feher’s works—discernible as such thanks only to the treasure-hunt-like “map” provided

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  print January 1996

  “Metageometries”

  Mounting a show under the ambitious if somewhat precious rubric “Metageometries,” Danish sculptors Elisabeth Toubro and Morten Stræde explored questions of spatial logic and discursive mapping. Their work, located on the seam that joins the visual to the linguistic, sought to disturb familiar presence/absence, center/periphery binaries by continually shifting the boundaries of self, home, and nation.

  Toubro’s installation, Seven Pillars, 1995, consisted of six crenellated polyvinyl-chloride air ducts surrounding a column that is part of the gallery’s architectural structure. The Slinky-like

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  print October 1995

  “The Masculine Masquerade”

  Querying a concept that, not unlike whiteness, once seemed either invisible or simply ubiquitous, “The Masculine Masquerade: Masculinity and Representation” sought to reinvigorate contemporary analyses of gender by turning its critical gaze (back) toward the male. Mounting an exhibition under the rubric of the newly resuscitated and influential 1929 Joan Riviere essay on “womanliness,” cocurators Helaine Posner and Andrew Perchuk laudably attempted to extend some of the insights of recent feminist theory in order to interrogate the category of the masculine itself. In this show, masculinity

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  print Summer 1995

  Scott Grodesky

  Scott Grodesky’s systematic, morosely ironic paintings investigate both the space of dystopian production and the production of dystopian space. In these rigorously nongestural compositions, each an idiosyncratic blend of figuration and abstraction, Grodesky replaces Renaissance-derived, one-point perspective with an unsettling anti- or reverse perspective. Consequently, objects seem to twist and bend, while unmoored automatonlike figures drift in the air, falling or floating up as if recoiling from a remote underwater explosion. Grodesky outlines his figures in graphite, filling them in with

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  print April 1995

  Roni Horn

  Roni Horn’s project-in-progress, “To Place,” of which the traveling exhibition, “Inner Geography,” comprises an integral part, is, she writes, “not really about Iceland” and “not really about me.” Rather, it explores the individual’s “dialectical interaction with a given place in the world”—that place, in this instance, being the remote and geologically diverse Scandinavian nation to which Horn has made frequent solitary journeys since 1975. Between subjectivity and location, body and landscape, Horn cleaves a space of mediation, rigorously investigating the facticity of “being there,” while