print March 2016

Tauba Auerbach

When considering Tauba Auerbach’s work of the past few years, I am often sent down a rabbit’s hole of unfamiliar mathematical and scientific terms: entheogen, the Sierpiński curve, metamaterial, oscillator fret. I order books like The New Ambidextrous Universe and The Shape of Space and print out early-twentieth-century treatises like Projective Ornament. It is with great pleasure that I dive into her world, but also with a bit of trepidation: not only because—just between us—I don’t really understand the fourth dimension, a theme that has fascinated Auerbach for several years now,

print February 2016

H. C. Westermann

Lined three deep on a massive table, the H. C. Westermann sculptures in this exhibition were stunning in their craftsmanship, blistering in their satire, and sometimes, as in the case of Walnut Box, 1964—a walnut box filled with walnuts—just plain funny. These small-scale constructions, some of the best that Westermann made, were accompanied here by forty-seven prints and drawings, two paintings, and eleven life-size assemblages.

Colored by his time as a marine on the USS Enterprise (called the “Grey Ghost” because of Japan’s multiple claims to have sunk it) in World War II, and later

print January 2016

Brigid Berlin

“Everyone, absolutely everyone, was tape-recording everyone else,” Andy Warhol noted about the Factory days. Everyone, perhaps, but no one as avidly as Brigid Berlin. From the 1960s through the ’70s, Berlin made thousands of tapes, recording everything from her morning calls with Warhol to the late-night local news. The droning audio of these tapes formed the backdrop to Berlin’s remarkable exhibition “It’s All About Me,” a collection of twenty-three Polaroids, more than forty “Tit Prints,” 1966–96, and a selection of journals and albums. The barely audible snippets of banal conversation seemed

print December 2015

Silvia Bächli

Silvia Bächli has invoked the words of the late Danish poet Inger Christensen several times throughout the past decade, taking inspiration and installation titles from the renowned writer, and even dedicating her presentation for the Swiss Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009 to her. This exhibition, Bächli’s first in New York in four years, continued the Swiss-born artist’s deliberate, durable engagement with the poet: Its title, “further. evolves,” comes from Christensen’s 1969 masterwork it. Because most of Bächli’s works—like all those that were shown here—are untitled, language

print November 2015

Ulrich Rückriem

For his first solo exhibition in New York in almost twenty years, Ulrich Rückriem quietly confounded the expectations of those familiar with his monumental sculptures. After all, it would not have been unreasonable to expect a spectacle like the one Michael Heizer presented at Gagosian earlier this year, that of an aging artist (now in his late seventies, Rückriem has been working consistently since the early 1960s) going bigger and brasher than ever before. But though Rückriem, like Heizer, is known for massive stone blocks, permutative methods, and an uncompromising, even contrarian personality

print October 2015

Harry Dodge

When Harry Dodge speaks, he does so profusely: Why, his artworks suggest, let one example serve when six will make the point more vibrantly? Thus the superlative video Love Streams, 2015, a four-part, fourteen-minute riff on quantum physics, object relations, automatons, and “an extra-long extender-thing for the tray that holds your keyboard,” a device that spreads as fancifully as its prolix description. Dodge’s staggering, stuttering descriptions are accumulative rather than taxonomic; examples are amassed and oppositions, images, and narratives are stacked atop one another rather than used

print September 2015

Jutta Koether

The paintings in “Fortune,” Jutta Koether’s cogent show at Bortolami, were hung flush against the gallery walls and lit from above. For audiences familiar with the German artist’s practice, such an arrangement is enough to warrant an exclamation point, or at least a parenthetical gasp. That’s how strongly this relatively conventional hang runs counter to Koether’s installations of the past several years, in which paintings were suspended from the ceiling, placed against glass panels, positioned on angled partitions and columns, and illuminated by whatever natural light the gallery could muster.

print Summer 2015

Claudia Comte

On a frigid day in March, Claudia Comte’s exhibition “NO MELON NO LEMON” provided a welcome respite from the gray of overcast skies and concrete construction. The yellow-and-white-striped paintings hanging on yellow-and-white-striped walls made the room feel sun blasted, the burnout effect pleasingly tempered by charred plywood panels banded by vertical cuts. Lustrous wood totems à la Jean Arp and Brancusi stood on plinths that seemed to have folded out from the panels, revealing the white wall beneath. These plinths, the strongest component of the exhibition, reinforced the tactility of both

print March 2015

Jan Schoonhoven

Writing in 1965 about his friend and fellow cofounder of the Dutch Group Nul (Zero), Henk Peeters recalled the words of Jan Schoonhoven’s supervisor at the Dutch postal service, where Schoonhoven was employed from 1946 until his retirement in 1979: “There are no better bureaucrats than Schoonhoven, who pursues his work with such scrupulous precision.” For an artist committed to removing both content and intent from his work, such praise was high indeed. As the selection of handmade reliefs and drawings at David Zwirner made clear, Schoonhoven, who died in 1994, never strove for an aesthetics of

print September 2008

55th Carnegie International

THE CARNEGIE INTERNATIONAL is the oldest contemporary art exhibition in North America—second in age worldwide only to the Venice Biennale—so it seems apt that its fifty-fifth incarnation is ambitious in scope and duration. Not only does this year’s installment, “Life on Mars,” take over almost the entire square footage of Pittsburgh’s Carnegie Museum of Art, but it also has an unusually long run of eight months, through January 2009. Scope and duration are not virtues in themselves, however, and here they may in fact accentuate many of the problems critics regularly find with such large-scale

print September 2008

Scott and Tyson Reeder

Brothers Scott and Tyson Reeder are musicians, filmmakers (Scott’s feature-length Moon Dust is currently in postproduction), and curators (most notably, they helped organize the Dark Fair at the Swiss Institute last March and co-organized “Drunk vs. Stoned” at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise a few years back) and are among the owners of the Milwaukee gallery General Store. They are also painters. Although they have been shown together before, the Reeders’ paintings are decidedly one-man affairs, each brother’s work maintaining its independence in style, medium, and attitude. Besides their penchant for

picks July 01, 2008

Danica Phelps

Danica Phelps has been charting her activities and expenditures for over ten years. But now, she says in her open letter–cum–press release, she’s done with the meticulous lists and color-coded financial system; she’s done, in effect, with accounting for the past. “Material Recovery” is the result: a transitional exhibition that bids farewell to cataloguing and even, with her creation of a stripe-painting factory that allows buyers to purchase paintings created by a team of assistants at fifteen cents a stripe (minimum order: fifty thousand stripes), releases control of production. As an exhibition,

print Summer 2008

Angelo Filomeno

Opulent symbolism does not equal erudition, but in the world of contemporary art we sometimes let things slide. We allow baroque excess to stand in for meaning, symbols to become trademarks that suggest generic “significance.” A diamond-encrusted skull becomes shorthand for violence, for excess, and, most of all, for Damien Hirst.

Angelo Filomeno’s embroideries run the risk of inviting such facile reception. Lavishly sewn with metallic threads on silk stretched over canvas and often appliquéd with crystals and semiprecious stones, the works boast a sheer luxury matched only by the overdetermination

previews May 2008

Nancy Spero

MACBA's retrospective will present gestures of defiance in some two hundred collages, gouaches, lithographs, and paintings—from Spero's earliest works on paper as an Art Institute of Chicago student in the mid-1950s to her installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners, 2007.

For more than fifty years, Nancy Spero has been, in her own words, “sticking [her] tongue out at the world” as a “woman silenced, victimized . . . hysterical.” MACBA's retrospective will present these gestures of defiance in some two hundred collages, gouaches, lithographs, and paintings—from Spero's earliest works on paper as an Art Institute of Chicago student in the mid-1950s to her installation Maypole: Take No Prisoners, 2007. Eschewing strict chronology, Manuel J. Borja-Villel's thematic organization should illuminate Spero's decades-long conflation of

previews May 2008

Eleanor Antin

This exhibition comprises twenty-three works from Eleanor Antin's series “The Last Days of Pompeii,” 2001, “Roman Allegories,” 2004, and “Helen's Odyssey,” 2007, along with videos documenting their creation and photographs and works on paper charting the artist's earlier projects and personae.

Over a roughly thirty-year period, beginning in the early 1970s, Eleanor Antin portrayed herself in various photo-based works as a king, a nurse, and a ballerina. Recently, she moved behind the camera, staging large-scale photographic tableaux based on Greek and Roman history and mythology. This exhibition comprises twenty-three works from Antin's series “The Last Days of Pompeii,” 2001, “Roman Allegories,” 2004, and “Helen's Odyssey,” 2007, along with videos documenting their creation and photographs and works on paper charting the artist's earlier projects and personae.

print April 2008

An-My Lê

Tucked between an installation of greatest hits from SF MoMA’s permanent collection and a show of Italian photographer Gabriele Basilico’s images of Silicon Valley, An-My Lê’s exhibition “Small Wars” is easy to miss. The exhibition, which consists of forty-seven large-format photographs of men playing war, includes two bodies of work about conflicts that are, in the American consciousness, anything but diminutive: The series “Small Wars,” 1999–2002, depicts a reenactment of Vietnam War battles in the forests of Virginia, and “29 Palms,” 2003– , records military exercises at Twenty-nine Palms (

print March 2008

The Peppers

In 1991, Ludmila Skripkina and Oleg Petrenko, who as a duo are known as the Peppers, installed Potato Room at Ronald Feldman Gallery. The Peppers were part of a loose-knit group of artists, dubbed “Moscow conceptualists” in the early 1980s, whose best-known member was Ilya Kabakov. The ’91 show was their first—and until now their only—solo gallery exhibition in the US. The Potato Room included, among other things, six large paintings, six wall hangings made of peas and book fragments, and numerous potato sculptures, hung on and stacked atop cerulean blue walls and pedestals. Seven gnarled potato

print February 2008

OPENINGS: RUTH LASKEY

RUTH LASKEY builds her pictures one thread at a time. With a minimum of means—three or four colors of thread she weaves geometric shapes into a ground of half-bleached linen: a chain of blue trapezoids (Twill Series [Ice Blue], 2007); two differently hued triangles that intersect to form a third (Twill Series [Deep Orange/Dark Brown/Purple], 2007); or green diamonds that overlap (Twill Series [Khaki Green/Resin Green], 2006). The works are not so much explorations as contemplations of color and form, and while they allude to Josef Albers’s studies of color interaction, they are too artfully

print February 2008

Kristian Kozul

In his first solo exhibition in the US, Croatian artist Kristian Kozul surrendered completely to the allure of the American cowboy. But rather than fetishizing the dust and drought of the old West, he glams up the cowboy’s grit with sequins and studs. Of course, the cowboy has always been something of a dandy, with his embroidered button-downs, starched Wranglers, ostentatious belt buckles, and heeled boots, and the Marlboro Man’s ruggedness has always been as much a performance as the Rhinestone Cowboy’s glamour. Kozul’s gallery presentation of a pair of boots and a hat, star-spangled in red,

previews January 2008

Tom Burr

Like Burr's past work, which gave priority to Minimalist forms, characters, and discourses, the five new interrelated installations presented at SculptureCenter focus on moments in American art history—in this case, those involving the stateside reception of European modernism.

The empty platforms and upended chairs in Tom Burr's previous sculptural tableaux made visitors feel as though they had arrived after the party was over. Such a sense of belatedness will likely also be part of the viewing experience here, given that it is the artist's first solo show in New York since 2003 and follows in the wake of two enthusiastically received Burr exhibitions in Europe. Like Burr's past work, which gave priority to Minimalist forms, characters, and discourses, the five new interrelated installations presented at SculptureCenter, and curated by Mary

Rachel Churner