Ren Ebel

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  picks March 13, 2023

  Pierre Allain

  While Pierre Allain’s “Soap Opera” may draw conceptual inspiration from the corporate-sponsored origins of that titular genre, it is the numb and haunted tone of his work that more closely evokes the soap opera’s vacuum-like atmosphere, with characters like coiffed prisoners pacing claustrophobic rooms in states of perpetual frustration, yearning, and doom.

  In an adjacent gallery space, three white obelisks stand along the walls of a tiny grey-carpeted room. The sculptures—all titled Skins Screen, 2023—are each coated in a stucco-like sprayable chemical called Apromud P150, a superabsorbent

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  print October 2022

  Raúl Domínguez

  In Raúl Domínguez’s “Media hora de sol” (Half an Hour of Sunshine), dozens of untitled drawings (all works 2022) covered one wall of a large hallway, scattered like dandelion seeds caught in an updraft. Most of these appeared on standard white A4 paper, taped to the wall, or else slipped into slightly crinkled plastic binder sleeves that were hung from pins. Beneath them, scrawled directly onto the wall, mural-size graphite enlargements of other drawings similarly depicted doodle-like scenes from the artist’s beguiling, polyamorous Eden. The drawings were not presented in a linear fashion, yet

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  print September 2022

  Hadi Fallahpisheh

  In a little house at the end of a long, winding path live four friends: Cat, Dog, Mouse, and Human. They play games, throw dinner parties, and frolic precariously near cactus plants bristling with gnarly, jagged thorns. These characters inhabited each of the five large canvases in Hadi Fallahpisheh’s “Getting Closer.” From a distance, the cartoonlike tableaux resembled paintings, or perhaps the nervous etchings of a reclusive lunatic. Actually, they were photographs—cameraless ones. Fallahpisheh spends hours in the darkroom burning playful illustrations and moiré-like patterns onto giant sheets

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  picks May 18, 2022

  CAConrad

  In CAConrad’s poem-rituals, words do not play coy. For the Kansas-born poet, language is less a refuge or flight of fancy than a means of facing pain head-on; theirs is the emphatic and honest bedside manner needed by an ailing planet. “13 Moons: Listen to the Golden Boomerang’s Return,” the artist’s first solo exhibition, is built from two recent collections of concrete poetry. The thirteen poems comprised by 13 Moons, 2014, are hung along the curved end of the gallery, while each of the 4 Antiwar Poems, 2022, appears emblazoned on a large white banner draped from the ceiling. Their forms—redolent

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  picks May 03, 2022

  Enric Farrés Duran

  While many artists have turned to “the archive” as an allegory for the various mechanisms and politics involved in historiography, few have done so while resisting the urge to create a dense, unwieldy archive of their own. Enric Farrés Duran’s exhibition “Acid Love Forever”—the result of the artist’s recent collaboration with the Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona’s historical archive—foregrounds the tools and fetishes of the archivist, assembling a collection of bleak and funny objects that provide quick, conceptual plunges into the quixotic ideals of art conservation.

  While some pieces play

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  print March 2022

  Katinka Bock

  The tympanic bone, a concave dome on a whale’s skull, houses the giant mammal’s inner ear. With this relatively small, resonant chamber, whales both maintain their sense of equilibrium and intercept far-off sonic transmissions from across the ocean. Le navigateur (all works cited, 2021), the ceramic centerpiece of Katinka Bock’s exhibition “Segment with unknown radius,” was modeled after this bone’s unusual shape. Dangling in the center of the gallery, it resembled a giant disintegrating bean skewered on a copper rod and doused in a thick glaze of bottle green, the color of algae or sea glass.

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  picks November 15, 2021

  Ander Sagastiberri

  The question posed by the title of Ander Sagastiberri’s solo exhibition “I Do Have Seen Some Objeto Volador No Identificados Do You?” looms over the twenty-one untitled paintings like a garbled transmission from outer space. The disorienting effect of the wonky half-translation extends to the work itself, which is vexingly shrunken. Most of the paintings are the size of mock artworks for a dollhouse or museum model, ranging in height from a few inches to no more than nine. Their scale demands extreme proximity from the viewer, lending the elaborate compositions a pressurized intensity. Sagastiberri’s

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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,”