Nicole Rudick

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  picks April 01, 2005

  Abigail Lazkoz

  Those who have already made their way through the crush at P.S.1’s recently unveiled “Greater New York 2005” may have glimpsed Abigail Lazkoz’s wall drawing in the second-floor stairwell. Monya Rowe gallery, however, is offering a scaled-down, intimate selection of black-and-white drawings by the Brooklyn transplant. Working within the spirit of her earlier projects—which adopted a mixed classical and contemporary visual verbiage to activate and update the problems surrounding questionable social values—Lazkoz’s five new ink-on-paper drawings take up an Escheresque, geometrical formalism that

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  picks March 19, 2005

  Emily Sartor

  In a nod to mid-nineteenth-century maritime painting, Emily Sartor’s depiction of the explosion of a ship amid darkly roiling waves provides an apt and tantalizing opening for the Louisiana native’s Chelsea premiere. The fine spatter of brilliant orange and bleached yellow that indicates the fierce blast is set at a safe distance from the viewer’s vantage, transforming carnage into an occasion for the picturesque. Sartor’s insouciance is most manifest in Blue Skies (all works 2004), which revels in cascading, exuberantly colorful parachutes that draw the eye away from rising, inky puffs of battle

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  picks January 25, 2005

  Nataraj Sharma

  Next month, “Edge of Desire,” the first major exhibition of contemporary Indian art in the United States, opens in New York at the Queens Museum of Art and Asia Society. That this productive and innovative art scene is long overdue for focused attention is made plain with the first North American solo show of one of its participants, Nataraj Sharma. The Baroda-based artist’s ten paintings and four works on paper display a developed and expansive visual language—all the better for his intelligent critique of human intrusion in the natural world, and, more broadly, of the disjointed perceptual

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  picks January 20, 2005

  Susan Homer

  The twenty-five paintings and drawings that make up Susan Homer’s first New York solo show are notable among recent art-world offerings as much for their unassuming views of gracious domesticity as for their no-tech, low-concept subject matter. Homer's canvases admit to a fascination with both nineteenth-century literary descriptions and plein-air Impressionism. Her rendering moves from quick, fluid brushwork that registers the lucent delicacy of tiny birds, dainty teacups, and papery flower petals to chunky impasto that relates the sensual qualities of these same objects. And Homer’s repertoire

• previews September 2004

  Ilya Kabakov

  Engaging the “work” of two fictional artistic personae, Charles Rosenthal and “Ilya Kabakov,” both of whom sought to reconcile representation and abstraction, the real Kabakov seeks a parallel synthesis between aesthetic experimentation and a new social realism.

  Having outlived the demise of the Soviet Union’s socialist Gesamtkunstwerk, recent septuagenarian Ilya Kabakov shows no sign of relinquishing the mantle of celebrated unofficial artist. Engaging the “work” of two fictional artistic personae, Charles Rosenthal and “Ilya Kabakov,” both of whom sought to reconcile representation and abstraction, the real Kabakov seeks a parallel synthesis between aesthetic experimentation and a new social realism. This massive and complex retrospective of 146 monumental paintings, mixed-media objects, and drawings, as well as didactics and wall texts, transforms

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  picks May 03, 2004

  Arthur Tress

  Brooklyn-born photographer Arthur Tress initiated his brown study of the unconscious in the late '60s, interviewing children about their dreams and then staging their fantastical scenarios for the camera. Making a directorial incursion into documentary photography at a time when the genre had yet to see such theatrical proponents, he fabricated subtle, delicate, pleasurable images from a signature mix of Surrealist horror, Pictorialist miasma, and Futurist rupture. The selection of nineteen black-and-white prints here, ranging from 1968 to 1982, offer a titillating dip into the macabre and the

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  previews May 2004

  Tamara de Lempicka

  Putting her art at the disposal of the moneyed European, and, later, American, class to which she belonged, Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) created some of the most iconic paintings of the Art Deco period.

  Putting her art at the disposal of the moneyed European, and, later, American, class to which she belonged, Tamara de Lempicka (1898–1980) created some of the most iconic paintings of the Art Deco period. This first major UK exhibition of her work gathers fifty-five portraits, still lifes, and nudes mainly from the interwar era and features a comprehensive catalogue with essays by, among others, Alain Blondel, author of Lempicka's catalogue raisonné. The artist's bohemian life is easily read in her sleek, often

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  picks March 18, 2004

  Nils Karsten

  For his first solo show, German-born Nils Karsten has created thirty figurative drawings, most executed on letter-size paper, that present an imaginative apprehension of adolescence. Karsten depicts this period of transformation as a time of becoming, defined by wishing and having, being and pretending, reality and insubstantiality—and by a child’s inability to distinguish among these. This contradictory dreamscape often appears as a flowing array of toys, animals, and weapons that are rendered in a mix of advanced draftsmanship and immature scribble; children who show signs of precocious puberty

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  picks January 23, 2004

  Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

  Rather than sidestep the white-cube debate in their latest installation—a melon-colored “museum” gallery at SculptureCenter—Ilya and Emilia Kabakov engage it, pointing to the significance of the viewer's role within this contested space. The Empty Museum comprises a rectangular room, its walls ringed in green and gold molding. Four high-backed black velveteen benches occupy the center of the space, and track lighting illuminates spots on the empty walls where art is conspicuously missing. Bach’s famous 1717 organ piece Passacaglia fills the windowless chamber, endowing it with a funereal

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  previews January 2004

  Gustav Klutsis and Valentina Kulagina

  Klutsis and his wife, Valentina Kulagina, created a vast number of agitational objects; roughly 150 posters, photomontages, books, photographs, and preparatory designs from the 1920s and ’30s feature here.

  It doesn’t matter who did it first—Dadaists or Soviets—but why it was made. Photomontage, for Gustav Klutsis, was indivisible from communist ideology. Content preceded form in importance, and it was this, he claimed, that differentiated Dada photomonteur from Soviet. He and his wife, Valentina Kulagina (both were involved with vkhutemas), created a vast number of agitational objects; roughly 150 posters, photomontages, books, photographs, and preparatory designs from the 1920s and ’30s feature here. In addition to an extensive essay by the curator, the catalogue

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  previews January 2004

  Hannah Höch

  Hannah Höch was not a “good girl.”

  Hannah Höch was not a “good girl.” She was, as curator Juan Vicente Aliaga notes, a “total woman.” Staking her claim among the male Berlin Dada group with grotesque photomontage hybrids that critiqued stereotypical gender relations, Höch continued, until her death in 1978, to propose a heterogeneous approach to art. The nearly two hundred objects on view—spanning the five decades of her productive life and including photomontages and lesser-known paintings, watercolors, drawings, etchings, and dolls—attest to this; catalogue essays by Aliaga, Ralf Burmeister, Karoline Hille, and others address

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  picks December 02, 2003

  “Remembrance: Russian Post-Modern Nostalgia”

  This intelligently conceived show brings together work by twenty-four artists who grew up in the Soviet Union. Guest curator Alexandre Gertsman’s point—that nostalgia for the Soviet past unifies much of contemporary Russian art’s range of styles and practices—is well taken. Some works here engage Western art history and its politics: In Leonid Sokov’s wonderful Meeting of Two Sculptures, 1999, for example, Giacometti’s famous bronze walking man strides toward a full-color statue of Lenin (even more famous), as if the two icons were about to wage a battle. Even more striking is the dialogue set