Robert Slifkin

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  print January/February 2021

  Ugly Feelings

  WHAT DOES THE WORK OF PHILIP GUSTON have to tell us about racism in the United States? And, for that matter, who is the us the work is speaking to? These questions are, of course, inspired by the postponement of a major retrospective of the artist’s work because of concerns that a group of paintings depicting members of the Ku Klux Klan might be misperceived in the current political climate, one marked by the conspicuousness of white-supremacist ideology and an art world highly attuned to the spectacularization of Black suffering. These questions have remained largely unexamined by scholars and

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  previews September 2017

  “JAMES ROSENQUIST: PAINTING AS IMMERSION”

  Like many Pop artists, James Rosenquist drew on the teeming image world of postwar consumer society. But unlike many of his peers, he appropriated the representational techniques and even the massive scale of one of commercial advertising’s chief forms: the billboard. Juxtaposing body parts, commodities, and sly allusions to art history within his panoramically scaled and surreal canvases, Rosenquist bridged the gap between the epic gestures of Abstract Expressionism and the cool monumentality of Minimalism. This exhibition will highlight the

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  slant May 2017

  Frank Heath

  IT IS ONE OF THE GREAT PARADOXES of our current era of mediated interconnectivity: We adopt the very same technologies used by intelligence agencies and corporations to covertly track our behavior as our primary means to communicate, to consume, and even to preserve our most intimate memories. This uneasy affinity between surveillant and surveilled provided the central theme of Frank Heath’s recent show at the Swiss Institute in New York. The duality was in fact already signaled in the show’s title, “Blue Room,” which refers to two quite different spaces: areas in prisons reserved for projecting

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  previews January 2017

  “James Welling: Metamorphosis”

  Unlike many other Pictures-affiliated artists who use photography, James Welling established a deep and remarkably sincere commitment to his primary medium even as he undertook an extensive investigation of its long-standing intermediary role in other artistic practices: Abstract and representational painting and sculpture along with film, architecture, and, more recently, dance have all crucially informed the artist’s oeuvre. The twenty-plus bodies of work spanning more than forty years featured in this show will provide an unrivaled opportunity to consider Welling’s

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  print February 2016

  James Welling

  The title of James Welling’s show—“Choreograph”—suggests an affinity between the artist’s principal medium, photography, and dance. If the former’s etymology is meant to convey the act of drawing with light (the “pencil of nature,” as William Henry Fox Talbot memorably put it in 1844), choreography, understood as the design of bodily movements, implies a sort of corporeal inscription of space. Welling’s new works, presenting nearly life-size photographs of expressively posed dancers, staged within what appear to be multiple exposures of unnaturally colored wintry landscapes and the