Paige K. Bradley

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  interviews April 07, 2015

  Natalie Frank

  Natalie Frank, an artist whose latest drawings investigate the Grimms’ fairy tales, will have an exhibition of these works at the Drawing Center in New York from April 10 through June 28, 2015, which will then travel to the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The work will also be the subject of a reading and panel discussion on April 30, 2015, at the Brooklyn Museum, and in May it will be published as a book by Damiani.

  I BEGAN THESE WORKS, which are based on the unsanitized version of the Grimms’ fairy tales, about four years ago. I picked up a copy of Jack Zipes’s The

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  picks March 20, 2015

  Lena Henke and Max Brand

  The exhibition starts in the stairwell, with battered sheets of painted cardboard woven through the banister and collaged with handmade sheets of rough, grody paper—welcome to the gallery, it’s been waiting for you. From there you ascend through two floors of discretely installed sculptures and large paintings, interrupted by hallways and landings displaying an array of manic collaborative efforts between Lena Henke and Max Brand, who studied at Frankfurt’s Städelschule together. The first floor hallway exhibits a zigzag pattern of shredded paper rectangles adhered directly to the walls with

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  diary February 26, 2015

  The Great Escape

  “TO BE AN ARTIST is incredibly downwardly mobile. You could ruin your career,” says K8 Hardy in the “What-the-fuck-ennial” segment of comedian-artist Casey Jane Ellison’s talk show “Touching the Art.” “And you should, try to ruin your career.” Premiering on YouTube a few days before the opening of the Third New Museum Triennial, Ellison’s show speculates that “all of art is just for insane people, like, exclusively.” Which sounds about right, though these days don’t we wish it were a little more ruined, a little more insane? Curated by former Rhizome director Lauren Cornell and Ryan Trecartin,

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  picks February 14, 2015

  Francesca Woodman

  Francesca Woodman’s brooding body of thirty, tiny photographs on view in this unassuming solo exhibition depict the artist, her friends in New York, or fellow students at RISD in the 1970s—common enough to her practice, but these works specifically come from a moment when the artist became keen on “trying her hand” at fashion photography. What emerged was a subversive meditation on how the feminized figure is variously enhanced and drowned by the cloaks and curves of fashion imagery and its coded imperatives. Across several black-and-white photographs, such as Untitled, New York (N.325), 1979–80,

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  picks January 15, 2015

  Saira McLaren

  For her first solo exhibition at this gallery, Saira McLaren shows nine paintings and three porcelain ceramic pieces that evince a keen empathy for materiality, color, and the mutability of form. The sculptures, all untitled and produced in 2014, are craggy lumps glazed in mint green and patched with gold, and sport alternating pockmarked or scaled surfaces like a coral fished from the deep.

  The paintings are wildly colorful yet somewhat ghostly due to how they’re less painted than stained with dye and pigment. Gestural marks are marshaled into a focused flow, evoking fantasy landscapes or the

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  interviews December 29, 2014

  John Waters

  John Waters is a filmmaker, writer, and artist. His latest exhibition of new photographs, sculptures, and a video is on view at Marianne Boesky Gallery in New York from January 9 through February 14, 2015.

  BECAUSE CELEBRITY IS the only obscenity left in the art world, it’s a subject I’ve had to make fun of and use. I titled this show “Beverly Hills John” because I’m in between pictures, and I don’t have a current box office profile in Hollywood. The press release image is me with the worst face-lift you could ever possibly get. I tried to imagine myself as if I’ve lost all reason. Many rich people

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  picks November 03, 2014

  Mira Dancy and Sarah Peters

  This two-person exhibition, featuring Mira Dancy’s riotously colorful acrylic paintings and Sarah Peters’s tactile, terracotta sculptures, pivots on the template of the female nude as a ground zero for aesthetic experimentation. Dancy’s paintings merge sprawling, busy compositions with comics-style color reminiscent of Gary Panter or Mickey Zachilli—all magenta, acid green, teal, and banana yellow shot through with silver curves. Take Dream of the Unicorn Tapestry (all works 2014), wherein a figure casually stretches out her arms while her legs lie loosely crossed at the bottom of the frame.

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  interviews October 24, 2014

  Glenn Kaino

  Glenn Kaino is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work addresses social and political histories while prioritizing individual subjectivity. His latest installation Tank, comprises seven saltwater-filled vitrines in which clear resin sculptures cast from a disused tank are submerged and covered in corals. It will be displayed at the Contemporary Arts Center New Orleans as part of “Prospect.3: Notes for Now,” the third iteration of the Prospect New Orleans biennial, which is taking place across fifteen venues from October 25, 2014 through January 25, 2015.

  IN MY WORK, I attempt to reconcile irreconcilable

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  print October 2014

  Hannah Wilke

  Though not quite a retrospective, this judiciously focused presentation, primarily composed of Hannah Wilke’s object work in sculpture and related drawings, implied the continued scope of the artist’s percolating influence some twenty years after her death. Copied onto a gallery wall at the exhibition’s entrance, her moving, ambitious text A Letter to Women Artists, 1975, set the tone: “I want to overwhelm you. I want to touch your feelings . . . Feel the folds.”

  Here, those folds, those little pieces of nature, as she called them, were grouped according to material, the major curatorial focus

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  picks September 12, 2014

  Lily van der Stokker

  For her latest exhibition, Lily van der Stokker has assembled a fiercely united front of matte, Pepto-Bismol-pink painted wooden boxes, furniture, panels, and walls bordered with ribbons of fuchsia and the occasional dollop of creamy yellow for a daisy’s center. The artist—a purveyor of margin-style doodles blown up to mural scale—begins the show with Yelling Women (all works 2014), a sculptural speech bubble protruding off the wall like an advertisement, proclaiming, “only yelling older Women in here Nothing to Sell.” It’s a preemptively dismissive gesture, and critical in turn for how it winks

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  picks July 02, 2014

  Rachel Maclean

  Among the coterie of contemporary artists embracing theatrical installation and narrative—Mary Reid Kelley, Allison Schulnik—Scottish artist Rachel Maclean is emerging as a politicized addition. The upcoming referendum this year on Scotland’s independence sets the tone for this exhibition where politics, celebrity, and the prospect of national unity in the context of the British class system are rendered as allegorical spectacle in luridly colorful CGI. Utilizing green-screen techniques common to film and television, Maclean constructs long-form videos with painstakingly detailed costumes and

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  picks May 27, 2014

  Len Lye

  A well-established figure in the history of experimental cinema, Len Lye’s stature in art history, especially as a crucial link between the early avant-garde of animation and mid-century modernism, has not been properly championed in the United States. This new exhibition makes significant strides towards rectifying that, as well as introducing a body of drawings, paintings, and memorably mysterious photograms never before exhibited, along with documentation of his kinetic sculptures. The foundation of Lye’s practice, which began in the 1920s and continued all the way until his death in 1980,