Noemi Smolik

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  picks December 05, 2016

  Moritz Grimm

  Eve is the name of humanity’s Urmutter, or first mother. Eve also stands for temptation. Both the original mother and attraction are motifs in the exhibition “EVA” by the young artist Moritz Grimm. The title of the show was borrowed from the artist’s partner’s mother, who died before Grimm could meet her. However, he did move into her furnished apartment. Enticement and the mother, especially of one’s own girlfriend, are subjects upon which many would founder. Not so for Grimm. For he turns the topic toward the fairy-tale-like, bringing the gruesome and the fantastic—which together constitute

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  print December 2016

  Florian Meisenberg

  German artist Florian Meisenberg has repeatedly staged confrontations between painted pictures and their digital siblings, and this was the case again in his recent exhibition with the lengthy title “Um, nice guy, good hospitality, but . . y’know . . I-I- I don’t think he knows how to turn on a computer. (brief pause) So . . . but th-the good thing is he’s filling the void . . uh, with coverage in xxxxxxxxxx at the moment so y’know they’re-they’re not drowning.”

  Three sets of pictures were on view: a digital video tiled across four monitors, projections on the floor, and paintings on canvas. The

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  print September 2016

  Marvin Gaye Chetwynd

  Some sights are unforgettable. Marvin Gaye Chetwynd’s performance Camshafts in the Rain, 2016, produced several such sights, including beetle-like actors wearing enormous colorful paper turbans while stalking around the gallery with the mechanical motions of automatons and a seated Medusa whose head, fringed with giant snakes, rose as a handle was cranked, then collapsed back on her shoulders with a heavy thud. The action was punctuated by moments of silence when the turbaned figures stopped as though glued to the spot. The spectators present the production with the wide-eyed awe of children.

  In

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  print Summer 2016

  Adam Vačkář

  Gorgeous color photographs, as elegant and beguiling as advertising pictures, showed crisply illuminated vases holding a variety of bouquets before white backdrops. And no less elegant were the steles that were set up in the middle of the gallery. Yet something about this installation by Prague-based artist Adam Vačkář felt disquieting. The series of bouquets bears the title “Beautiful & Damned,” 2014, and they are no doubt beautiful—but why are they damned? Look more closely and you’ll discover that some of the flowers, slipped in among others gleaming in diverse colors, have wilted. And

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  print May 2016

  Aaron Angell

  Aaron Angell makes strange pictures. Strange because of their indeterminate age (they might be a hundred years old) and cultural background (they might be the work of an Asian or Arab artist, or else pieces of European folk art; in fact, the artist was born in Kent, UK, in 1987 and lives in London). Even odder is the technique with which they were executed. Their surfaces look like terrazzo floors in Italian villas, cold and a bit forbidding and yet—perhaps there is no contradiction here—quite elegant. As it happens, they were painted, or, more properly speaking, spray-painted, on the

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  print April 2016

  Henning Fehr and Philipp Rühr

  Psychedelia is back, or so Benedikt Sarreiter and Paul-Philipp Hanske insist in their 2015 book Neues von der anderen Seite: Die Wiederentdeckung des Psychedelischen (News from the Other Side: The Rediscovery of the Psychedelic). The two journalists champion a reassessment of psychotropics, whose sophisticated use, they argue, can help us navigate the vicissitudes of life. They note the current renaissance of these drugs—which had fallen out of favor after their heyday as the favorite hallucinogens of the counterculture—at the Burning Man festival, for example, which draws thousands

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  print March 2016

  Dóra Maurer

  I first encountered Dóra Maurer’s films at a 2012 symposium on aspects of Central European art at the Sächsische Akademie der Künste in Dresden, and I still have a vivid recollection of watching them as though in thrall; their power drew me in. Starting in the 1970s, the artist, who was born in Budapest in 1937 and still lives in the Hungarian capital, undertook a searching examination of change through experimental films, photographs, paintings, collages, and drawings. How can an image embody change? Any change implies movement, so one can always analyze it, break it down into component images,

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  print December 2015

  FORT

  Although it is often rendered in English as “uncanny,” the nuances of the German word unheimlich are famously difficult to translate. The negative prefix un- modifies heimlich, which derives from Heim, home, and originally means “familiar.” Unheimlich, then, is what is unfamiliar, strange, and, by extension, vaguely menacing. And the objects, installations, and performances of FORT, an artists’ group founded in 2008 by Alberta Niemann, Jenny Kropp, and Anna Jandt, who left in 2013, are certainly strange. Unheimlich also aptly describes the objects in their recent exhibition “About Blank.”

  Even

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  print November 2015

  Thomas Locher

  As if to recall the consistency of his project over the decades, some of the works in Thomas Locher’s exhibition “Post-Information” were as much as twenty-five years old. Gestell (Frame), an aluminum shelf engraved with letters, numbers, and black rectangles, dates from 1990. A.1–Z.2, a wooden board on which horizontal black bars as well as letters and digits are inscribed, is even older, from 1989. On the facing wall were two reliefs, composed of rectangular panels of varying thickness painted in different colors. Each is marked with a letter. Insisting on their objecthood and defying any

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  print October 2015

  Rita McBride

  If ever there was an exhibition of art that seemed totally secure, literally under lock and key, it was Rita McBride’s “Gesellschaft”: The show included plenty of keys as well as several locks and then more keys. But where is the door they unlock?

  The ten-millimeter steel plates from which the locks and keys were cut were on view as well, although their meaning remained likewise obscure. The use of metal slabs brought Richard Serra’s work to mind, and the installation—most of the objects were arrayed along the gallery’s walls—clearly suggested a Minimalist sensibility in the use of

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  print September 2015

  Renata Lucas

  A few years ago, Renata Lucas was asked what she thinks art is for. She replied, “Perhaps it’s one of the few things left that allows us to declare that we don’t fit the given standards.” Her own investigation of those given standards operates in the field of urbanism—more specifically that of metropolitan architecture. Studying the relationship between public squares and private spaces, the intricate workings of traffic hubs, or the ways in which sidewalks form trajectories of experience and social life, she deftly devises ways to break prevailing architectural and social molds, often with

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  print February 2015

  Maria Bartuszová

  Imagine a form that exudes vulnerability as well as resolve, pliancy as well as recalcitrance, that features geometric shapes and is nonetheless organic, that looks provisional and yet is timelessly self-contained, that is alive with tension but still imparts a sense of calm, that suggests the most intimate eroticism while attesting to the most refined purity. If this seems impossible to conjure, then look at the work of Maria Bartuszová. Such ambivalence is the defining characteristic of her art and probably accounts for the incomprehension with which these wonderful objects have often been