picks January 28, 2020

Gilda Picabea

In this exhibition’s two series, Gilda Picabea implicitly restages debates that arose in the 1940s in response to Argentina’s Concretist painting, whose practitioners were dead set on banishing illusion and reference from their medium. Her pictures reactivate those efforts, injecting viewers with the feeling that we are “possessed by our ancestors, by those others who have looked and lent their bodies to the dialogues of painting,” as María Amalia García writes in the show’s catalogue. But Picabea moves beyond Concrete art, and even evokes forms of representation that may seem anathema to them.

print March 2019

Ad Minoliti

In the foyer of “The Feminist School of Painting,” her first institutional solo exhibition in the US, the Argentinean artist Ad Minoliti assembled a browsing library with books and zines on queer theory, posthumanism, science fiction, veganism, and antiracist education. Next to the bookshelves were twelve small works made by other designers and artists, including some chosen by those who co-facilitated the workshops that she organized during her residency at Kadist. The eclectic range of objects—including two collages by Elisabeth Wild, a T-shirt with a graphic by Jacqueline Casey, an unassembled

picks April 20, 2016

Jorge Macchi

“Perspective” is Jorge Macchi’s most expansive show to date in his hometown of Buenos Aires. A survey of more than fifty works from the past twenty years—including paintings, collages, videos, and installations—the exhibition is anchored by the tension between Macchi’s broad range of mediums and his ascetic restraint.

Many of the artist’s works explore the basic geometric construction of an action or scene, such as the circumference sketched out by the blades of a ceiling fan or the lines traced by speeding cars. These forms are the starting points for carefully delimited delirium, as in the

picks May 20, 2015

“International Pop”

Full of productive juxtapositions and sight lines that bring together Conceptual, Fluxus, Neo-concrete, and classic Pop works from four continents, “International Pop” presents a complex interpretation of postwar art. The works exhibited are surprisingly heterogeneous, with one common denominator: a desire to reimagine everyday life in an era transformed by consumerism, media, and new forms of political domination and liberation.

Viewers first encounter Shinohara Ushio’s Oiran, 1968, a portrait of a courtesan whose face has been left blank. Hanging nearby are a few dozen plastic coats on Thomas

picks January 12, 2015

Mark Mothersbaugh

When Kent State shut down after the 1970 shootings, art students Mark Mothersbaugh and Gerald Casale were locked out of their studios and made music at home. They later named their band DEVO, short for “de-evolution,” their term for all the ways the world was falling apart. In collages from the ’70s displayed here, like those in his artist’s book My Struggle, Booji Boy, 1977, Mothersbaugh appropriates and disfigures bodies and texts from scientific illustrations, bra ads, and cult screeds. They all seem to be saying the same thing: “This is America, and it is strange!”

Installed across three

picks September 09, 2014

Harmony Hammond

Harmony Hammond’s exhibition “Becoming/UnBecoming Monochrome” offers a sampling of the artist’s works, including fourteen large paintings from 2001–2014, fifteen smaller paintings from the mid 1970s, and Collection of Fragments, 1974–76, a display of baskets, shoes, and pottery. In some of the early paintings, such as the lozenge-shaped Ninja, 1976, Hammond created density, depth, and luminosity with oil paint and Dorland’s wax, working the viscous mass, perhaps with the butt end of the brush, into a honeycomb or spongelike pattern. Almost forty years later, the surface still seems wet and alive,

picks August 19, 2014

Eduardo Costa

In 1968, Vogue published Richard Avedon’s photo of star model Marisa Berenson wearing a twenty-four-karat golden ear made by Eduardo Costa, a young Argentine artist living in New York. This was one of Costa’s many “Fashion Fictions,” wearable sculptural items that appeared in Harper’s Bazaar, Glamour, and other magazines in Latin America and the US. Like the media art he produced in Buenos Aires in 1966, these were conceptual works about cracking the media’s codes. The first large room encountered by visitors contains documentation of Costa’s “Fashion Fictions,” along with mannequins wearing

picks August 13, 2014

Mimmo Rotella

Mimmo Rotella described his décollages as a “protest against a society that has lost the desire for change.” By tearing down advertising posters and peeling away some of their surface in his studio, he wanted to release the materials’ latent “moods,” believing this would give a “patina of hope” to an otherwise bleak world.

The exhibition at the Palazzo Reale presents Rotella’s décollages alongside his retro d’affiches, “poster backs.” This is the name that Pierre Restany gave to Rotella’s found and reworked compositions that include the caked glue and ripped paper from multiple posters, whose

Patrick Greaney