Pier Paolo Pancotto

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  picks October 02, 2014

  Martin Soto Climent

  Martin Soto Climent’s latest solo exhibition, “Luster Butterfly,” nearly fills this gallery’s newly renovated and expanded space with twenty-five works that straddle painting, sculpture, and readymades, all of which are inspired by issues such as visibility, crowding, consumerism, and precariousness. Paintings, photographs, and various objects—such as sunglasses, a spray-painted statue, a metal grid, a stool, and a feather used as an ornament on a broken windshield—are arranged on the floor or walls individually or in groups, or hung from the ceiling. The totality creates an installation that

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  picks July 14, 2014

  Alfredo Aceto

  The intervention Alfredo Aceto conceived for this exhibition is as simple as it is effective. In Frutta Gallery’s project room, he presents five works from his series “Mask Paintings,” 2014. These pieces were inspired by a practice followed by car companies before new vehicles go on the market. In order to downplay similarities, prototypes are disguised with adhesive panels decorated with optical motifs on a black background. With this in mind, Aceto has designed stamps of various circular abstract patterns and applied them with black ink on monochrome canvas or plasterboard surfaces.

  The works

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  passages July 04, 2014

  Carla Accardi (1924–2014)

  IN MARCH 1947 IN ROME, Carla Accardi, the only woman in an otherwise entirely male group, signed the Forma manifesto, immediately joining a debate that was animating the postwar art world, on “figuration/nonfiguration” and on whether or not to be “politically engaged.” Born in Trapani, Sicily, in 1924, she studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and then, in 1946, went to Rome, where she would live until her death on February 23, 2014, in her studio-home on the Via del Babuino a few steps from Piazza del Popolo.

  Photos from those early years in Rome depict a very young, slender woman

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  picks June 23, 2014

  Mircea Cantor

  Mircea Cantor’s latest exhibition, titled “Ti do la mia giovinezza” (I Give You My Youth), is symbolic of what art and life are capable of expressing. The youth the artist addresses here is not described as personal data, but rather an intellectual dimension that serves as a common denominator for all the works on display.

  The installation Cantor conceived for the Kunsthalle Budapest in 2008, which was made up of seven cement volumes of various sizes that depict the contours of gift boxes, is seminal to this show’s grouping, titled Future Gifts (all works 2014), of twenty-one sculptures of equal

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  picks April 22, 2014

  Laurent Montaron

  Laurent Montaron examines reality, essentially relying on two investigative systems. One consists of the direct observation of physical and chemical conditions in the natural world; the other considers technological systems, particularly those of the recent past, and their capacity to mechanically reproduce those natural conditions with precision. Through his highly structured typology of works, Montaron visually and acoustically explicates his research. Consistently informing the artist’s creative process, which exists halfway between scientific studies and alchemical formulas, the nature-technology

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  picks April 02, 2014

  Dove Allouche

  French artist Dove Allouche has a remarkable ability to renew his own language while remaining faithful to his original working methodology. His artmaking is based on graphic, chalcographic, and photographic techniques—particularly historical ones from the nineteenth century—that together result in visual manifestations rendered mostly in black-and-white tones and, at times, in color. The subjects that inspire him constitute a pretext for examining the effects that natural and artificial events produce on them, altering their structure and how they are perceived.

  This is effectively demonstrated

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  picks March 18, 2014

  Celia Hempton

  In her first solo exhibition in Italy, Celia Hempton presents thirteen oil-on-canvas works. Their subjects are female and male sex organs, and their titles—Justine, Jo, Eddie, Alex, Caspar, and Kamal, all 2013—are the names of the friends and models who posed for anatomical portraits, either live or via video. These typically hidden body parts are here not only revealed but foregrounded. False modesty is nowhere to be found—just clarity and disarming self-confidence. The use of vivid colors and fluid, soft brushstrokes, which brings to mind the expressive radiance of Fauvism, allows these intimate

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  print March 2014

  Ian Tweedy

  Ian Tweedy’s most recent solo show was called “My Neighbors The Von Stauffenbergs.” The title is not as fanciful as it may sound; the works in the show, all dated 2013, were inspired by the American artist’s childhood, when he lived for a period in Berlin with his family in a building also inhabited by descendants of Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, one of the authors of the failed attempt on Adolf Hitler’s life in July 1944. Tweedy had only rare and fleeting interactions with his neighbors, but apparently these were sufficient to leave an indelible mark on his memory. These recollections

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  picks February 24, 2014

  Pádraig Timoney

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  picks February 18, 2014

  Alice Ronchi

  For her debut exhibition at the Francesca Minini gallery in Milan, Alice Ronchi has created an enchanted landscape of wooden forms that—like a film set that comes to life when used to shoot a scene—becomes animated when viewers are present. The viewers activate and vitalize Ronchi’s “urban garden” as the artist’s biomorphic and bucolic forms conjure the emotional states typically evoked by the natural flora and fauna that her stylized objects depict. This is seen in the four groupings of works in the show. All from 2014, they unfold discursively throughout the gallery’s rooms, together making

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  print February 2014

  Monica Bonvicini

  Monica Bonvicini’s exhibition “Then to see the days again and night never never be too high” brought together a group of works that reasserted the basic assumptions of the artist’s creative path thus far. Addressing many of her recurrent themes as well as formal strategies, the show felt almost like a retrospective. Two rooms contained three sculptures from the series “7:30 hrs,” 1999–, which skillfully uses a spare and anti-rhetorical approach to confront the challenging issue of labor. These three-dimensional groupings were constructed by professional bricklayers following the instructions

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  picks January 21, 2014

  Nicola Gobbetto

  Twenty years after his death, Rudolf Nureyev is being celebrated in Nicola Gobbetto’s current exhibition more as a man than as a dancer. Like chapters in a book, the ten pieces on view (all works 2013) tell a linear story of Nureyev’s existence: his alternating periods of success and crisis, strength and weakness, joy and sorrow. Gobbetto’s work here focuses on specific episodes in Nureyev’s life, revealing even its most private aspects.

  The show opens with Pork Lake, a short rotoscope animation inspired by an 1978 episode of The Muppet Show in which Nureyev and Miss Piggy stage an ironic version