Nicolas Linnert

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  picks July 21, 2014

  Patricia Esquivias

  Probing the relationship between historical preservation and individual memory, Patricia Esquivias’s film 111-119 Generalísimo/Castellana, 2014, traces stories around a 1950s housing project in Madrid’s current-day financial district. Much of the film focuses on ceramic murals originally installed for the balconies of the buildings; each mural depicts a different city around Europe, the intent during Franco’s reign being to project an image of Spain as a thriving, international state. Many were removed over time, some salvaged pieces of which are on view along with photographs and texts in this

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  picks July 15, 2014

  Louise Lawler

  Louise Lawler’s exhibition “NO DRONES” traces the forms of some of her most cited and contested photographs, exchanging color and shadow for reedy, suggestive black lines that interrogate an image’s construction and potential for reading. As Lawler’s prior works have acquired a comfortable aura of notoriety and value within the presentational and commercial apparatus they critique, the artist pivots back onto these referents, reconstructing them as phantom pictures.

  Hand On Her Back (traced), 1997/1998/2013, an inkjet print on vinyl adhered to a wall, directly confronts viewers passing through

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  picks June 25, 2014

  Hervé Guibert

  Of the nearly fifty photographs by Hervé Guibert on view here—the largest assembly in the US to date—all but a few exceptions are captured within intimate, directionally lit interiors. As a photographer, journalist, theorist, and AIDS activist, Guibert documented his relations with his friends, lovers, and the social energies around him. His journals—recently translated into a nearly six-hundred-page tome—and photographs showcase a meandering, vigorous subjectivity: insatiably observant, emotionally porous to the forces of everyday life, while seemingly uncaring of his own lyricism.

  Guibert

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  picks May 06, 2014

  Raymond Pettibon

  Raymond Pettibon’s oeuvre of drawings presents its ambivalent attitude to avant-garde resistance by illustrating acts of sexual or violent depravity via mainstream American iconography, produced at an industrial scale and rate of production. The artist’s surfer paintings, with their lurid, ebullient wave renderings and transcendental textual citations, mark a surprising anomaly, spanning nearly thirty decades of work. Here, Pettibon’s critique is either demonstrably more subtle, positioning wave-riding post-1960s counterculture as complicit figures within a consuming force—or increasingly

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  picks May 06, 2014

  Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster

  Interiority and reflection are key themes of Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster’s New York debut, which comprises treasured pieces from the artist’s wardrobe alongside prints and biographical ephemera. Clothing is presented as a tool that symbolizes phases of Gonzalez-Foerster’s biography while delineating chameleonlike explorations of self. Assembled along a perimeter-spanning wooden rack, pieces dating back to 1965 are suspended, mostly from wire hangers, while twine cords run from wall to wall, connecting objects as remnants of related memories. Like her variegated practice, which includes film,

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  picks March 31, 2014

  Rose Marcus

  Rose Marcus’s solo exhibition “March” comprises four expansive ink-jet prints on vinyl adhered to the walls; each are cropped photo enlargements that depict shadowy figures from the waist down. The imagery (reminiscent of surveillance footage) and its materially impoverished presentation (the vinyl media relies wholly on existing gallery architecture) stir an ambiguous tone on the potential for resistance and individual agency amid an enveloping structural apparatus.

  A tiled concrete floor shades the images’ backgrounds, while glassy reflections in the foreground cloud views of the bodies visiting

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  picks March 25, 2014

  Sarah Sze

  One of the more poignant aspects brought to mind from Sarah Sze’s untitled three-floor installation from 2013 is its deliberate, insistent display of artistic choices. Sze is known for scouring public environments, bringing in often gossamery materials to produce works of spatial depth that reflect the lapse of time and labor while processing these objects for their informative and aesthetic potential.

  A banal corporate desk occupies the installation’s first room, suggesting the entry into a workspace. Scissors, sticky notes, and artists’ tape scatter the surface, along with used Amtrak paper

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  picks February 24, 2014

  “Why We Fight”

  “Why We Fight: Remembering AIDS Activism” reminds us of the moral balance required when retroactively documenting the AIDS activist movement: how to historicize the activist community’s inventive spirit while simultaneously accounting for the expanse of desperation that incited political action. Making this more challenging is that much of this struggle was never recorded. The exhibition draws heavily on the attractive, graphic tactics of groups such as Gran Fury and ACT UP. The latter’s parodic “Wizard of Oz” poster series from the 1990s is on display, which teases politicians by comparing them

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  picks January 15, 2014

  Superflex

  Centered within the grounds of the Jumex juice factory, Superflex’s retrospective is broken into two parts, one of which encompasses a number of public presentations set for the exhibition’s closing weekend, including discussion panels on emerging economies and economical speculation as well as the unveiling of a prototype system for biogas-based energy production called Supergas.

  Grounding the public program is the work presented within the factory. Titled “The Corrupt Show,” the exhibition acts as a career survey, highlighting the Danish collective’s seductive, commercially spirited critique

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  picks January 14, 2014

  Liz Glynn

  Informed by the surging piracy off the Somalian coast in 2013, during which ransoms drove profit margins for pirates, Liz Glynn’s New York debut showcases an economy of precariously assembled objects. A suspended, partially wrecked boat hull, Vessel (Ravaged, Looted, & Burned) (all works 2013), takes over the back gallery. Its wood-plank midsection has been ransacked and untidily reassembled, functioning purely to connect the boat’s undamaged front and rear. As an artwork, the wooden agglomeration gestures toward its functionality beyond material appearance—it won’t traverse bodies of water,

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  picks November 17, 2013

  Dale Henry

  Ahead of the Clocktower Gallery’s scheduled eviction comes a four-decade-spanning survey of Dale Henry, an artist that, disillusioned with swelling social and financial structures that increasingly clouded the artistic landscape, resolutely left New York in 1986. Before his death in 2011, Henry bequeathed his life’s work to the gallery’s founder, Alanna Heiss, on the condition that she keep the collection from contact with the market, reflecting both idealism and a practice focused on investigative control.

  Cocurated by Heiss and Richard Nonas, the exhibition presents works focused on the

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  picks October 10, 2013

  Annette Kelm

  A pair of floral espadrilles leans against a lurid tie-dye backdrop printed with common chat phrases in Espadrilles, U R MY BFF, LOL!, HOW R U? (all works 2013). Here, Annette Kelm has deregulated the relationship between subject and background: The frenzied wallpaper spans toward the viewer’s eyes as the studio lighting flattens any defining shadows on the shoes. This visual maneuvering evinces Kelm’s larger strategy—applying the flimsy yet powerful neoliberal trope of individual freedom to her own photographic method. Kelm moves between disparate techniques and subjects with flaneur-like