Nicole Rudick

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  previews May 2009

  “Jaromír Funke and the Amateur Avant-Garde”

  The first extensive show of Funke’s photographs outside Europe displays his lyric imagery alongside that of twenty-two of his compatriots. Some seventy works will contextualize this lesser known movement of self-taught photographers within the interwar explosion of avant-garde art.

  A leading member of the Czech avant-garde in the 1920s and ’30s, cofounder of the Czech Photographic Society, and an influential teacher, Jaromír Funke (1896–1945) produced abstract still lifes and images of modern and classical architecture whose provocative play of shadows and forms invites comparisons to the work of Atget, Man Ray, Morandi, and Sheeler. Rather than highlighting these affinities, however, the first extensive show of Funke’s photographs outside Europe displays his lyric imagery alongside that of twenty-two of his compatriots, including Josef Sudek

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  previews May 2009

  “Silent Pictures”

  The show combines selections from Art Spiegelman’s collection of rare early-twentieth-century wordless comics with materials gathered in the course of cartoonist Andrei Molotiu’s research into contemporary abstract comics.

  Thankfully overcoming the curatorial urges to which comics have lately been subjected—the high-low quibble and the drive to canonize—“Silent Pictures” instead undertakes an oblique investigation of the medium’s essential qualities, examining formal structure and syntax through wordless and nonnarrative sequences. The show combines selections from Art Spiegelman’s collection of rare early-twentieth-century wordless comics with materials gathered in the course of cartoonist Andrei Molotiu’s research into contemporary abstract comics. The latter group includes work by an

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  previews January 2009

  Aleksandr Rodchenko and Liubov Popova

  This show cuts across categories by presenting diverse works by two of the Constructivist movement’s most influential practitioners, revealing the aesthetic currents that shaped their various projects from 1917 to 1929.

  Though the Russian avant-garde’s commitment to interdisciplinarity arguably exceeded contemporary notions of multimedia practice, exhibitions of Constructivist art today tend to examine the period by way of gender, medium, or a single artist’s output. This show cuts across categories by presenting diverse works by two of the movement’s most influential practitioners, revealing the aesthetic currents that shaped their various projects from 1917 to 1929. The approximately 350 objects on view will include Liubov Popova’s textile designs and canvases from her early

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  film October 21, 2008

  Fear Factor

  IN FEAR(S) OF THE DARK (2008), an international cast of graphic artists gives life to dread, fright, panic, terror, and just plain high anxiety. But these spine-tingling delights, rendered in bare-bones black-and-white, aren’t simply about things that go bump in the night. Rather, the six interwoven tales—by Blutch (aka Christian Hincker), Charles Burns, Pierre di Sciullo, Marie Caillou, Lorenzo Mattotti, and Richard McGuire—offer a distinct whiff of how varied horror can be.

  Di Sciullo presents the most humane treatment of the night’s dark dreams. His pairing of morphing abstractions with a

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  print March 2008

  Sarah Pickering

  Preparedness seems to be a watchword of the era of “global terrorism” and global warming. The expectation of calamity keeps us stockpiling food, water, and moist towelettes, even as the distance between preparing for an unknown catastrophe and actually experiencing it encompasses a vast speculative terrain. In her third series on disaster preparedness, British artist Sarah Pickering again investigates that divide, plotting her most incisive course yet into the weird realms of simulated reality in which first responders practice their trades.

  Pickering’s earlier series “Public Order,” 2002–2005,

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  print January 2008

  Miranda Lichtenstein

  While several of the photographs in Miranda Lichtenstein’s recent show build on the artist’s interest in painterly still life and the frozen moment, a handful break with this pattern to introduce not just a sense of movement but a system of temporal flux. In the photographic diptych Dream Machine, 2007, the artist sits behind a stroboscope device that in the first image is still and in the second is blurred by motion. And in another diptych, Two Trees, 2007, the image of a tree trunk appears to continue upward from one shot to another hung directly above it, over the gap between frames. Though

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  picks April 03, 2007

  Olga Chernysheva

  The highlight of Olga Chernysheva’s New York solo debut is The Train, 2003, a seven-minute video that records a seemingly single-take voyage (à la Russian Ark) through the cars of an intercity Moscow train. Though the camera’s progression toward the back of the train follows the linear path of the railway, Chernysheva’s meandering passage through crowds, empty coaches, dining cars, and sleeping berths—set to the contemplative strains of Mozart’s Piano Concerto no. 21—instead proposes a circuitous spatiality. In this and much of the work on view (a sampling of her oeuvre from the past seven

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  picks September 18, 2006

  Lola Alvarez Bravo

  While the fifty-five photographs on view in this show, the first major exhibition of Lola Alvarez Bravo’s work in more than a decade, seem an abbreviated selection, they nevertheless offer an occasion to appreciate the stunning range and tender character of her oeuvre. As Mexico’s first woman photographer, Alvarez Bravo developed a taste for photography during Mexico’s cultural renaissance in the 1930s—among such luminaries as Manuel Alvarez Bravo (her husband until 1949), Frida Kahlo, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamaya, and Julio Castellanos. Her aesthetic, however, was very much her own

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  picks January 19, 2006

  Sarah Pickering

  “Explosions,” Sarah Pickering's debut solo show, is both as understated and as boisterous as its title implies. The British artist's eight large-scale photographs capture the pyrotechnics of various types of bombs and explosives, suspending the fiery or smoky bursts at the moment of simulated impact. The quality of each blast—land mine, smoke burst, electric thunderflash, and so on—is distinct not only in appearance but also in tone. Napalm produces a low-slung, compact gray cloud that menaces the flat, sullen British countryside; the ground burst, by contrast, emits a brilliant flash

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  print January 2006

  Valery Koshlyakov

  In 1984, Alexander Brodsky and Ilya Utkin imagined a museum that would house disappearing urban buildings, important and otherwise, as a way of salvaging the past and, thus, collective memory. Each building, reduced to a scale model, would hold equal status in the exhibit. “After all,” the duo explained, “each is suffused with the soul of its architect, builders, inhabitants, and even the passersby who happened to cast an absentminded glance its way.” Their project, notable for its inevitable juxtaposition of all forms of architecture and its muddling of high and low, prevailing ideologies, and

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  picks December 26, 2005

  Ellen Altfest

  Since her debut show at Bellwether in 2002, Ellen Altfest has become decidedly more precise and yet, at the same time, considerably less so. Her earliest canvases, which took in broad, sometimes expressive, often ungainly landscapes, gave way to academic visual descriptions of lichen-covered rocks and tree trunks. But with her latest works, Altfest seems to have stopped making studies and begun making paintings. The ten canvases in this show frame close-up views of cacti and succulent plants, as well as the odd gourd and log, from subtly different perspectives, evincing both Altfest's new

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  picks April 11, 2005

  Nicki Stager

  If the quality of light in an artist's studio is important (not to mention, of course, its many and varied manifestations within the painted scene), is it doubly so for the photographer? And what, then, for the maker of the photogram? In this process, light becomes medium, form, and instrument, and, as Nicki Stager’s suite of nineteen photograms demonstrate, all else is superfluous. Though she retains the supernatural and poetic values that characterize the works of some of the medium’s early experimenters, like László Moholy-Nagy and Varvara Rodchenko, and that of more recent practitioners like