Ren Ebel

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  print Summer 2021

  León Ferrari

  Near the entrance to “La bondadosa crueldad: León Ferrari, 100 años” (The Kind Cruelty: León Ferrari, 100 Years), a survey dedicated to the Argentinean artist—who died in 2013 at the age of ninety-two—hung a letter from New York–based nonprofit Franklin Furnace, apologetically declining Ferrari’s request that a live vulture be included in “Heretic Chapel,” his 1987 show there.

  The vulture is an easy symbol for the bloodlust and cruel indifference that so often prompted Ferrari’s prankish and poignant satire. Two of these birds can in fact be seen skulking like cartoon villains aboard the Santa

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  picks November 03, 2020

  Paulino Viota

  Though it references Paulino Viota’s 1970 opus in its title, “Paulino Viota, Contactos” omits that singular insurgent classic of underground cinema to instead highlight the Spanish filmmaker’s obsessive research and adaptive visual style. Much of the gallery is taken up by several works on paper—artifacts of Viota’s lifelong practice as both film scholar and teacher: a dense visual diagram of the famous Odessa Steps scene from Battleship Potemkin, a Jakobsonian dissection of Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 129,” and a collaged encyclopedia-cum-fanzine on Godard’s cinema. 

  Four of Viota’s short films are,

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  performance April 27, 2020

  Weak House

  ON APRIL FOOL’S DAY, around two weeks into my quarantine in Spain, I attended a comedy show: thirty minutes of new material by Maria Bamford, provisionally titled The New Material Show, broadcast live and for free via Zoom from her home in Los Angeles. A couple of hours before showtime, I received an email which began with a caveat that doubled as an enticement: “Instead of comedy, this may feel uncomfortable.”

  Bamford is no stranger to discomfort, or to working from home. Her comedy, whose predominant themes are family and mental illness, has often availed itself to a kind of self-imposed house

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  picks March 23, 2020

  Vivian Suter

  After her studio in Panajachel, Guatemala, was destroyed by Hurricane Stan in 2005, Vivian Suter began adapting her painting practice to her temperamental environment. She started painting large abstract washes of color outdoors, leaving the unstretched canvases to dry in the jungles near Lake Atitlán. Pigment, house paint, fish glue, rainwater, leaves, mud, and errant marks left by plant and animal life combine to form energetic compositions inspired and manipulated by nature.

  For “Tintin’s Sofa,” the Swiss Argentine artist’s latest exhibition at Camden Arts Centre, scores of these paintings

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  picks December 18, 2019

  Per Kirkeby

  The Danish artist Per Kirkeby died last year, leaving behind a body of work that seems to have zigzagged through a gnarly forest of twentieth-century art-historical landmarks: Pop-adjacent figurative paintings, expressionist abstractions, brick sculptures blending Danish masonry and Minimalist seriality, and quietly odd bronzes resembling engorged and mangled Giacomettis. Later on, he became internationally known for his work with Lars von Trier, designing titles and visual interludes for Breaking the Waves, Dancer in the Dark, and Antichrist. This modest retrospective, “Hommage à Per Kirkeby,”

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  picks October 21, 2019

  Richard Wentworth

  Long before artists had Instagram, Richard Wentworth began documenting moments of accidental sculpture encountered on city streets, ultimately collecting them in his ongoing photo series “Making Do and Getting By.” Banal yet uncanny, those abandoned household objects, tangles of construction debris, and DIY patch jobs described a kind of assemblage motivated not by taste, but by something more practical and desperate. The sculptures in “Lecciones Aprendidas” (Lessons Learned), Wentworth’s current show at Nogueras Blanchard, aim to emulate this provisional quality.

  Writing History (all works cited,

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  picks August 23, 2019

  Joan Jonas

  Within the dreamy grotto of Joan Jonas’s exhibition “Moving Off the Land II,” one appropriately feels swallowed up by a gigantic fish. Towers of skeleton-like metal scaffolding mask the inner walls of the sixteenth-century church that is now home to Venice’s Ocean Space, an interdisciplinary venue with a focus on marine research and advocacy. These remnants of the Chiesa di San Lorenzo’s renovation, kept in place by Jonas for this inaugural exhibition, obscure the structure’s sacred context while retaining its grand scale and cavernous echo. High above hang enlarged images of sea creatures

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  picks July 08, 2019

  Oier Iruretagoiena

  It seems the quaint rural scene has lost its palliative effect in the age of climate disaster. Four of the seven works in Oier Iruretagoiena’s exhibition “Hezur berriak” (New Bones) are pieced together from discarded amateur landscape paintings the artist collected over two years. He dissected and rearranged these canvases into irregularly layered quilt-like banners, sutured by the visible runs of a sewing machine. What comes through most clearly is the latent charge in these generic and sentimental subjects—craning treetops, mazelike groves, a distant seaside village—as they index the ambiguous