Noemi Smolik

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  print October 2021

  Yann Gerstberger

  The first impression was overwhelming: all those colors and shapes! French-born artist Yann Gerstberger, who now lives in Mexico City, covered all the interior walls at the gallery with colorful chalk murals. The first wall on the right, for example, was taken up by rectangles in light blue, orange, and gray—a distant echo, perhaps, of the rigorously geometric painting of European modernism. But then scrawled circles supervened: possibly allusions to the sun, or simply doodles, graffiti like that we see every day on the street. Positions that not so long ago might have seemed far apart—historicist

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  picks September 29, 2021

  Mary-Audrey Ramirez

  Mary-Audrey Ramirez’s objects are enlivened by a tension that can be observed more and more often in contemporary art: the incongruity between subjects sourced from the technologically mediated worlds of the internet and movies and their representation in artisanal techniques like bricolage, molding, or sewing. The Luxembourg-born artist’s installation of hand-stitched fabric sculptures in Prague, for example, borrows its motifs from the 1998 feature film adaptation of the cult sci-fi series The X-Files, specifically the moment when the two heroes discover a subterranean nest of mutant bees that

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  print April 2021

  Anna Boghiguian

  Anna Boghiguian tells stories. The daughter of a Cairene Armenian family, the artist—who celebrates her seventy-fifth birthday this year—has led an itinerant life: traveling between Europe, Asia, and Africa, between the countries of the erstwhile colonial rulers and those of their slaves, as well as between antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the present. Even when her stories stretch into ancient times, they are always about the present. Consider the installation she created for her current exhibition, “A Short Long History” (curated by Ann Hoste) which is made up of works that trace the global

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  slant December 30, 2020

  Impostor Syndome

  WHAT HAPPENS when a painting is unmasked as a forgery? The colors, the forms, and the brushwork remain the same, and yet, everything has changed. The spell of authenticity, related to what Walter Benjamin called an artwork’s “aura,” has broken. A taboo-shattering exhibition organized by Rita Kersting and Petra Mand at the Ludwig Museum in Cologne, titled “Russian Avant-Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake” and on through February 7, seeks to pick up the pieces, provocatively pairing its works of questionable provenance alongside authentic loans in order to contextualize the challenges

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  print December 2020

  Berenice Olmedo

  Can there be a human body without organs? That is the question Mexico City–based artist Berenice Olmedo pointedly raises with her installations and objects. Laid out across the floor in her recent exhibition “CsO, haecceidad” were pneumatic splints made of translucent plastic—orthopedic devices used in poor countries such as Mexico or India to immobilize broken legs or arms. Commonplace medical devices, they nonetheless have something organic, even human, about them. Here, weighed down by bags filled with sand, they were connected by tubes to a machine that slowly inflated and deflated them.

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  print October/November 2020

  Henrik Olesen

  What a surprise! Born in Denmark and long based in Berlin, Henrik Olesen is well known as a Conceptual artist whose objects, installations, and collages, which often focus on marginalized groups, interrogate the ways in which dominant power structures and social norms shape human identity, language, and the body. This show, however, did not feature collages or installations made up of photos, handwritten notes, pages torn from books, and newspaper clippings, but predominantly comprised paintings in oil and other materials on wood or canvas. Nevertheless, the starting point for Olesen’s new works

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  print September 2020

  siren eun young jung

  It all started with a photograph of a wedding party. There was nothing unusual about the scene at first glance: the bride and groom, the family. . . . Yet as South Korean artist siren eun young jung examined the picture more closely, it gradually dawned on her that the people depicted in it were all women, including those whom one might initially have thought were men. They were members of a troupe of performers of yeoseong gukgeuk, a variant of traditional Korean opera sung exclusively by women. Established in South Korea in the 1940s, the art form remained popular until the 1960s. Delving into

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  print May/June 2020

  Thao Nguyen Phan

  Thao Nguyen Phan’s “moving images”—as she prefers to call her video projections—are gorgeous and profoundly disturbing at once. Dare to watch them with unguarded eyes, and they will worm themselves into the deepest recesses of your memory, rising up time and again as a reminder that beauty is sometimes inextricably alloyed with sorrow. Born in Vietnam in 1987 and based in Ho Chi Minh City, Phan was studying painting at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago when she started to experiment with film. An encounter with the work of Joan Jonas, who would later become her mentor, encouraged her

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  print February 2020

  Anna Gaskell

  Anna Gaskell first became known in the late 1990s for enigmatic photos of young women and girls—images that imply a narrative yet elude attempts to give them a meaningful interpretation beyond their evident but nonspecific allusions to Alice in Wonderland. The throughline to these pictures is almost impossible to describe but has to do with what one might call their latent pedophilia-tainted aura, which makes them at once seductive and disturbing.

  Gaskell’s most recent works, all made in 2019, are drawings that likewise have a disturbing effect although one can’t immediately say why. They, too,

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  print January 2020

  Edith Dekyndt

  Composed of everyday objects such as refrigerators and a sofa, Edith Dekyndt’s new installations often suggest a sober-minded approach to artmaking in the tradition of Minimalism. They even resemble some strains of Minimalism in their engagement with the space around them and the playful irritation of our relation to the objects on view. The comparison ends there, however. Dekyndt’s works are not neutral artifacts made of industrially manufactured staples placed in arrangements that emphasize form and the interaction between a work and its setting. On the contrary, the artist charges—indeed,

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  print December 2019

  Zhanna Kadyrova

  Communist-era statues remain a divisive issue in the former Soviet empire. In Prague, for example, a controversy recently flared up over the monument to the Soviet general Ivan Konev, who liberated the city from the Nazis in 1945 but also led the brutal suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 and was involved in preparing for the invasion of Czechoslovakia by Warsaw Pact troops in 1968. The municipal administration had the statue veiled to protect it from vandals, then voted to have it removed this past September. Supporters and opponents of Konev have held rallies at his feet. To avoid

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  print October 2019

  Anna Daučíková

  What makes Anna Daučíková’s work so fascinating is its severe, even acerbic lucidity on the one hand, and its poetic refinement tinged with eroticism on the other. Both qualities were on display in the new piece that Daučíková, the recipient of the 2018 Schering Stiftung Art Award, created for the exhibition of her work at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art. Titled Expedition for Four Hands and Accompaniment, 2019, it consisted of several sheets of engraved glass, a publication commemorating the late Greek human-rights activist and drag queen Zak Kostopoulos, and a three-channel projection.