print September 2008

Mária Bartuszová

Mária Bartuszová was little known outside of Slovakia until a cross section of her works from 1970 to 1987 was presented last year at Documenta 12. Born in Prague, Bartuszová spent most of her life in the city of Kosice, in the east of Slovakia (almost on the Ukrainian border), and died there in 1996, at age sixty. Her works are typically amorphous, globular plaster of paris forms fastened by cords to holes in Plexiglas plates. The encounters of the malleable plaster objects—their surfaces painfully choked by twine—with the hardness and inflexibility of the plate evoke not only vulnerability,

print September 2008

Miyako Ishiuchi

Galerie Langhans, which has mounted the first European retrospective of the photographer Miyako Ishiuchi, who represented Japan in the 2005 Venice Biennale, has an unusual history. The Langhans family was a well-known dynasty of portrait photographers whose customers comprised the great and good of Europe, the King of England among them. After the Communist seizure of power, they were driven into exile. When the family reclaimed their home several years ago, they discovered nearly nine thousand glass-plate negatives hidden away—each one a gem. A small gallery in the house offers carefully selected

print May 2008

Janis Avotins

What does the show’s title, “I write to you at 20:02 as you wrote to me at 18:08,” have to do with Janis Avotins’s pictures? At first glance, not much. Perhaps it makes us think of the e-mails that mercilessly follow us everywhere at all times—but as for the pictures themselves, their strength lies in their ability to transcend chronological and locational specificity. Gigantic, for the most part more than ten feet high and sixteen feet across, they seem to resist analysis, and their titles aren’t of any more help than that of the show, either. In Nothing from Nothing, 2008, a black cloud

print April 2008

Paul Thek

In the late 1960s and the ’70s, Paul Thek, the American artist to whom Susan Sontag dedicated her book Against Interpretation (1966), seemed to be everywhere. He had exhibitions at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1969) and at Moderna Museet in Stockholm (1971), and his work was included in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972, in the Venice Biennale in 1976 and 1980, and in the big “Westkunst” show in Cologne in 1981. Then his career went quieter. In 1988, Thek died of AIDS, but just four years later Mike Kelley would write, “Now he has suddenly been taken up again by historians. Why? The obvious

print February 2008

Joanne Tatham and Tom O'Sullivan

What presents itself as meaningful is not always so; and what at first seems meaningless can be deeply significant. “Lead Rhetoric & Other Category Errors,” the meaning-laden title of this exhibition by Joanne Tatham and Tom O’Sullivan, who live in Glasgow and have been collaborating since 1995, already hinted at this contradiction. But what rhetoric was at work here, and what errors were in question? The rhetoric was that of Minimalism, and sometimes of Land art. Using the same form in various contexts, the artists might place a large cube in a landscape, or a smaller one in a museum on a

print January 2008

Jiří David

In Prague, where Jiří David lives and works, he is already widely known. Zare (The Glow), 2000, the glowing neon crown of thorns he constructed above the roof of the classical exhibition and concert hall Rudolfinum, and Heart on the Castle, 2002, a gigantic red neon heart above Prague Castle, the center of power of the Czech Republic, have both left a lasting impression. He also continually attracts notice with his critiques of Czech cultural politics, published in the local press, decrying the country’s provincialism and dilettantism, which he feels have forced its artists into harmful isolation.

print December 2007

“Talking Pictures”

When, in his 1967 article “Art and Objecthood,” Michael Fried attacked the Minimalists for their theatricality, he could not have known that his critique would affect the dialogue between art and theater for decades to come. Even videos, performances, and installations became antitheatrical. But no more: Today’s films and videos feature drama, role play, and pretense—a point underlined by K21 curator Doris Krystof in her wonderfully installed exhibition “Talking Pictures.”

Theater is, above all, a form of social interaction, and as such, it has not only an aesthetic but an ethical component;

print November 2007

Poul Gernes

Although Poul Gernes, who died in 1996, is well known in Denmark, where he exerted a decisive influence on the development of the local art scene during the second half of the last century, his reputation is just beginning to extend beyond the borders of that country. While the colorful panels from his “Stripe Series,” 1967–68, were shown in Kassel as part of Documenta 12, this Berlin show offered a look at Gernes’s earlier work. He made these pieces soon after joining forces with art historian Troels Andersen in 1961 to found the Eksperimenterende Kunstskole (the Experimental Art School), known

print October 2007

Lisa Tan

Never before have I seen such an austerely conceptual exhibition with so few images and so much text that, at the same time, was imbued with such lightness, tenderness, heartfelt longing, imagination, and even humor. For her previous show in Munich, New York–based artist Lisa Tan plotted out an imaginary journey in The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2004, that would take her to visit all the publicly exhibited works by Hieronymus Bosch in 124 days. In this exhibition, “The Baudelaire Itineraries,” she turned her attention to the writings of the French poet, art critic, and dandy Charles Baudelaire.

print September 2007

Katie Holten

In a society that increasingly excludes nature from everyday life, how can today’s art engage with the natural landscape? Katie Holten—born in Dublin and living, nominally, in New York although primarily on the road—is looking for an answer to this question. “I’ve always preferred to question things in a silent way, or at least a less aggressive, in-your-face kind of way,” Holten once said in an interview. And, indeed, it is true that her approach to nature is one of meditative affection. Her meticulous India-ink drawings, depicting trees without foliage, branches, imaginative structures of

print September 2007

Friedrich Kunath

Two long, narrow rooms, right next to each other, both visible from the street through high windows—this was the setting of the installation by Cologne-based artist Friedrich Kunath at Galerie BQ. Although the two rooms could only be entered separately from the street, they were connected by one element: In the right-hand room, the flue pipe of a small green tiled stove went through the dividing wall and twisted around in the left-hand room. Apart from this pipe, however, the two juxtaposed spaces seemed to contain two completely different worlds.

Recent paintings by Kunath covered the entire

print May 2007

Tommy Støckel

There’s a story about Max Bill, the director of the Ulmer Hochschule für Gestaltung, which after 1945 aimed to follow in the tradition of the Weimar Bauhaus. It is said that he could be driven into a state of white-hot fury by a bouquet of flowers placed in one of the school’s rooms. The plants’ exuberant forms went against the strict clarity of modernism, based on the principle of the square and the view that this form has eternal and universal validity; flowers, by contrast, wilt and fade. In his sculptures and installations, the Danish artist Tommy Støckel questions precisely these two basic

Noemi Smolik