Nicolas Linnert

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  print January 2019

  Dayanita Singh

  The Pothi Box, 2018, is Dayanita Singh’s latest “book object,” an unbound photographic publication, produced in an edition of 360, mounted directly on a gallery’s walls. Thirty boxes—each filled with thirty prints—were hung in a horizontal line at Callicoon Fine Arts. Additional copies were wrapped in cloth that was fastidiously knotted, and arranged in stacks on a nearby table. Most of the book’s imagery documents material accumulations, such as countless towers of film, rows of uniformly bound novels, and entire rooms lined with swaddled groupings of archival materials. One picture

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  print April 2018

  Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien

  “It’s hard to get kids to cooperate . . . ,” a woman laments in Enzo Camacho and Amy Lien’s short video Mother Holding Taobao Child (all works 2018). “My kid is only two and a half years old.” In a photography studio located on the outskirts of the Chinese city of Yiwu, she speaks between the sounds of shutter releases and camera flashes, as her child is photographed modeling for an e-commerce website. This eastern metropolis in Zheijiang Province is home to a vast emporium of more than seventy-five thousand shops and stalls selling cheaply produced goods, most of which can be had for about a

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  print September 2017

  McDermott & McGough

  Titled “Hollywood (Homosexual) Hopeful,” this exhibition comprised more than a dozen new paintings purportedly first made in the 1960s—all works cited here, for example, bear the dates 1965/2017. The three large paintings that formed the most immediately cohesive grouping in the show were located in a small white shed next to the gallery’s back patio, evoking a typical artist’s studio for a hobbyist painter in this Los Angeles beachside neighborhood (the gallery is located in Venice). The works depict mid-century interiors in the manner of real estate photography—the scenes are spotless

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  print March 2017

  Oliver Payne

  A jar of jelly beans, a replica of a charred Game Boy console, a set of inked fingerprints on a plastic sheet—these were some of the items included in Oliver Payne’s exhibition “Seven Objects.” This title, which corresponded to the number of works installed, is a reference to Miller’s Law, which states that, on average, the human mind can account for seven objects in its working memory. George Miller, a pioneer in the field of cognitive psychology, cites multiple examples supporting his theory in his watershed 1955 text “The Magical Number Seven, Plus or Minus Two”: the seven seas, the

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  print November 2016

  “Eau de Cologne”

  Monika Sprüth, reflecting in 2015 on the inaugural “Eau de Cologne,” a group exhibition mounted at her gallery in tandem with 1985’s Art Cologne fair, characterized the show’s all-woman roster as an incidental that caught her unaware—a calculated claim that served as a sly rejoinder to the art world’s patriarchal exclusivity, which dominated then and persists today. Since that moment, “Eau de Cologne” has maintained an iterative existence, reappearing in 1987 and 1993 and then in 2015 and 2016. Successive stagings would include new artists alongside the work of a few veterans from the 1985

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  picks October 14, 2016

  Art & Language

  Fifty years separate the two series of work on view here by Art & Language, the fiercely Conceptualist collaborative that originated in 1966 and began to publish its namesake journal in 1969. Four works from “Paintings I,” 1966, a characteristically text-based series of ink on paper adhered to wood, span two walls of the diminutive gallery. Nearby is “These Scenes,” 2016, comprising five framed works that visually summon Kazimir Malevich’s 1915 monochrome Black Square. Like the 1960s works, “These Scenes” extends the spare aesthetic and rigorous intellectualism that formed Art & Language’s

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  picks September 23, 2016

  Sam Lipp

  At Yany’s Beauty Salon on Rivington Street, a handful of mostly Hispanic workers can be seen spraying hair products and administering heating regimens over casual chatter, while a distinct trace of aerosol and burnt keratin wafts outside. Next door, beside Yany’s magenta street signage, a work by Sam Lipp, Do You Smell Fumes? (all works 2016), displays its inquisitive title in electric green neon. Inside the gallery, the same thought becomes an aesthetic motif, interrogating notions of purity as they extend to common understandings of wellness, security, and normalized social relations. But, in

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  print Summer 2016

  John Baldessari

  Writing in these pages in 1995, art historian Lane Relyea remarked, “When you’ve experienced as much success as Baldessari has, you probably aren’t too worried about how urgent and timely your art looks, yet, without even trying, Baldessari’s still does.” Between then and now, the artist has rooted his legacy in Los Angeles, both as a significant pedagogical figure and as the subject of numerous touring museum retrospectives. This recent exhibition at Sprüth Magers, which inaugurated the gallery’s California venue, presented sixteen large ink-jet prints on canvas. All of the works featured found

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  print March 2016

  Jean Baudrillard

  Las Vegas, 1996: The photograph depicts a craggy, mountainous desert horizon forming a silhouette against patchy sheets of clouds and the broad blue daylight above them. A stagnant haze lingers at the foothills, punctured by outlines of palm trees and aircraft tail fins. The stretch of tarmac in the image’s foreground appears as hazy as the dense fog above it. Commercial jets and ground-control vehicles are darkened outlines, obscured by directional daylight. Sainte Beuve, 1987: A vacant armchair upholstered in red velvet is framed against a blank white wall seemingly under bright, studio

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  print February 2016

  “Assisted”

  “Assisted,” a vibrant group exhibition curated by Jessica Stockholder, was predominantly installed on the second floor of Kavi Gupta, above Stockholder’s concurrent solo show “Door Hinges.” Many of the artists included were either Stockholder’s friends or her former pupils; she had selected them based on a mutual interest in the “potential of alternative exhibition modalities.” This theme of nonconformist show organization, stressed throughout “Assisted,” was introduced with the placement of Tony Tasset’s Cup (2), 2013—a bronze cast, painted white, of a spirally torn Styrofoam cup—atop

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  print November 2015

  David Hockney

  Around 2008, when David Hockney began making work on iPhones, the artist opined, “Who would have thought that the telephone would bring back drawing?” It was a glib statement for a painter who clearly relishes the opportunity to remind audiences of his engagement with new technology. After all, in hindsight (several years and countless Apple hard- and software updates later), Hockney’s remark would seem to reveal a strikingly limited understanding of the smartphone. Even as far back as 2009, the majority of its users only sporadically accessed the device’s application for making direct calls.

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  picks October 02, 2015

  “Terrapin”

  If art and wildlife have any correlation, a lover of both might evoke their propinquity to the sublime. “Terrapin,” organized by Magnus Schaefer, takes a direct, albeit frisky point of departure: Each work—save for one—features representations of animals, often conjured through differing levels of anthropomorphic adjustment. So the question could be posed, What is the sublime to an animal, and how do humans represent such? The answer, it would appear here, lies in absurdity and sex.

  We might first examine the grouping’s exception: Bethenny, 2015, a swirling oil-on-canvas work by Lise Soskolne.