Nicolas Linnert

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  picks July 16, 2013

  Carissa Rodriguez

  Carissa Rodriguez’s New York solo debut is inspired by Éric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, a 1967 film that follows the social ordeals of an aspiring young art dealer, a dissatisfied conceptual artist, and a flirty jeune fille, Haydée. The young lady is Rohmer’s collectress, a sexual dilettante who amasses a powerful portfolio of lovers. Rodriguez’s exhibition develops the film’s disgruntled artistic social circle into a theme that evokes the apparatus of art, capital, and commerce: Within her work, these characters act as blueprints for instruments in a formalized productive system, where the

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  picks June 02, 2013

  Dashiell Manley

  Upon entering Dashiell Manley’s installation, The Great Train Robbery (Scene 3 version B), 2013, the viewer is immediately confronted with a large steel wall frame and, leaning against it, a glossy Plexiglas surface. Beneath the acrylic plane is a pastiche of ink spatters, pencil-drawn notes and storyboards, and brightly colored lighting gels. This flat surface’s opposing side, of gouache on linen, showcases painted geometric forms (checkers, arcs, rectangles) overlaid by dripping turn of the century shorthand symbols. Five iterations of these two-part structures are dispersed throughout the

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  picks May 29, 2013

  Peter Roehr

  As an artist, Peter Roehr explored making objects that could be mechanically reproduced. He worked feverishly at times, but ultimately rejected the idea of being an artist, his life ending shortly thereafter, when he died of cancer at the age of twenty-four. Of the five mixed-media works and a three-part film on view, two are punch cards, both untitled and created in 1963, with numbers zero through nine running serially in individual bands across the rectangular paper. Here, machine-stamped micro voids replace the work of the artist’s hand and exemplify Roehr’s minimal interest in artistic

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  picks March 28, 2013

  Sverre Bjertnes and Bjarne Melgaard

  “Do you ever question me and my loyalty as your friend?” Sverre Bjertnes asks collaborator Bjarne Melgaard in their video If You Really Loved Me You Would Be Able to Admit that You’re Ashamed of Me, 2013. Melgaard is silent. Alissa Bennett, sitting beside him, responds in his place. The moving camera continuously circumnavigates the three individuals, whose lavish sartorial ensembles change with almost every successive scan. The work was filmed at White Columns—one can even see painters in the background preparing the walls for this collaborative exhibition of the same name—where it is now on

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  picks January 04, 2013

  Yvonne Venegas

  Yvonne Venegas’s photography, possessing elements of portraiture and social documentation, tends toward individuals used to attention: adored actors, detested socialites, proud brides, or a famous twin sister. Her museum survey chronologically arranges six photographic series made from 1990 to 2012.

  In 2006, Venegas photographed the production of Rebel, a hugely popular Mexican telenovela. Following the show’s third season, the cast became a pop group and performed to sold-out arenas. In Cumpleaños (Birthday), 2006, actress Anahí Puente sits primped between film takes at a hospital bedside as

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  picks November 14, 2012

  Gerard Byrne

  At a vacated corner store on the Lower East Side, dried dirt marks the interior’s tile floor while the storefront’s awning, lined with Chinese script, is the remainder of its previous owners’ aborted entrepreneurial pursuits. For now, the space also houses Gerard Byrne’s film and photography installation Why It’s Time for Imperial, Again, 1998–2002. Pristine images of pages from National Geographic line a wall, documenting an advertisement for the 1981 Chrysler Imperial. The promotional copy consists of a scripted conversation between Lee Iacocca and Frank Sinatra, the latter questioning what

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  picks August 06, 2012

  Charlotte Prodger and Jason Loebs

  Everywhere at Essex Street gallery, one sees objects depicted nearing the end of life. Faded signatures and waning pastel Visa logos are overlaid with sections of credit card information in Jason Loebs’s five untitled vertical prints (all works 2012). The enlarged four-color images degrade this quotidian plastic object of symbolic exchange that characterizes an age of increasing immateriality. The murky printed figments are mounted to backbones of stiff wood panel, a material that associates with industrial labor and an age of production preceding the flexible credit economy. Appearing expended

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  picks July 05, 2012

  “Fükengrüven”

  “Driving enjoyment” is the rough English translation of Volkswagen’s 1990 advertising slogan. The German mantra—Fahrvergnügen—projected ease and playfulness and quickly spawned a decal, seen on cruisers like the VW Bus, that featured a linguistically modified axiom: Fükengrüven. That easy-livin’ motto is now the title of a group exhibition comprising prints, sculptures, and paintings. Here, the advertised ease of operating Volkswagen machinery acts as metaphor to the artists’ comfortable handling of tools and materials. In this respect, “Fükengrüven” retains the TV spots’ joyful sentiment while

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  picks June 14, 2012

  Jon Rafman

  There is an easy space for skepticism when facing the shifty depictions in Jon Rafman’s art. His latest exhibition, “Mirror Sites,” is currently on view at M+B and closed at International Art Objects on June 9. Among other works, the show at M+B features “9-Eyes of Google Street View,” 2011, a series of large-scale digital prints pulled from Google’s servers. Fv261, Finnsnes, Troms, Norway, 2011, also at M+B, captures an astonishing lakeside panorama where defined clouds stretch against a vivid sky as lush hillsides frame the landscape's dilapidated subject: a moss-covered boat, washed up on

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  picks May 24, 2012

  Francesca Woodman

  Because we know how her story ends, Francesca Woodman’s retrospective reads equally as psychological study and survey exhibition. Before her suicide at age twenty-two, Woodman had produced a sizable collection of serial photographs, often showing her figure as blurred, camouflaged, bent, and contorted. The young artist consistently fashioned her body as a subset of her surrounding environment, mapping onto her figure the mundane indicators of space and temporality.

  In her artist book Portrait of a Reputation, ca. 1976, Woodman lays out five silver prints of her upper half. As her body shifts

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  picks March 19, 2012

  Cheyney Thompson

  Cheyney Thompson’s art touches on such wide-ranging subjects as the art market, temporality, and the French archetypal villain Robert Macaire—sometimes within the space of a single work. For his first US museum survey, the artist’s rhizomatic research is highlighted through paintings made in the past six years. The thirteen canvases from his glistening, jubilant “Chronochromes” series, 2009–11, are unified along a color spectrum that documents its own creation: With every hour of production, contrasting color pairs were shifted in hue, and brushstrokes’ saturation levels changed with each passing

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  picks February 21, 2012

  Rita Ackermann

  “BAKOS,” Rita Ackermann’s first major survey in her hometown, is also the artist’s family name. The exhibition, which focuses on paintings produced in the past three years, reads like a rhapsody of expressive and artistic growth. At the heart of the show is Fire by Days, 2011, a sequence of paintings animating the show’s central gallery, where rich, conflagrant reds overlay with dynamic indigo hues. Here, large scarlet splashes become gazing visages, which in turn transform to sinuous feminine figures. Both expressive and hazily delineated, the paintings conjure a mood that is as uplifting as