Sarah Moroz

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  picks July 23, 2021

  Louise Bourgeois

  Louise Bourgeois’s approach to art not only aligned with psychoanalysis but marshaled it. The exhibition here highlights her commitment to confronting emotional wounds via the unconscious, locating repressed traumas and fantasies through Freudian free association and interpretation. Bourgeois underwent analysis with a former disciple of Freud’s for more than three decades, starting in 1952. As a complementary exercise, she recorded her dreams and process notes: sometimes typewritten on sheets of loose-leaf in a mélange of French and English, sometimes handwritten in pencil on graph paper or on

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  picks July 08, 2021

  Alicja Kwade and Louise Nevelson

  Kamel Mennour’s two-woman show devoted to Louise Nevelson and Alicja Kwade might be titled Face-à-face, but it’s really more of a cadavre exquis. The two sculptors were born eighty years apart—Nevelson in 1899, in what is now Ukraine, Kwade in 1979 in Poland. Here, Kwade “reacts” to a selection of Nevelson's 1970s-era pieces with new and pre-existing works of her own.

  Nevelson studied drama with Frederick Kiesler, gravitated toward Martha Graham’s dance work, and admired Pre-Colombian art. These influences are felt in her charred black wood totems, whose dense chromatic homogeneity allows their

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  picks May 17, 2021

  Marcus Leslie Singleton

  “Being a part of the circus is being born into this world,” said Marcus Leslie Singleton regarding his first solo exhibition, “Circusland,” at Turn Gallery in 2019. Across a series of twelve oil-on-panel works for this new show, Singleton traded the spectacle of acrobats and unicyclists for pointed yet subtle observations about contemporary Black life. Each of Singleton’s “Bubble Paintings” (2020–21) features ovoids—which double as cocoons, apparitions, or entrapments—set against colorful backgrounds with willowy leaves and branches. The forms evoke the visual language of comics and graphic

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  picks May 07, 2021

  “Heritage: Carte blanche à Omar Victor Diop"

  “Heritage” is a loaded word: a resource and a millstone both. Omar Victor Diop—the Dakar born and based photographer—embraces African lineage as a fortunate fellowship. He culls some fifty images from the rich archive of portrait photography that flourished throughout the African continent in the mid-twentieth century. In 2016, Diop explored the continuity between this studio tradition and the present in a show at Galerie du jour agnès b. that juxtaposed his depiction of a contemporary generation of creatives with Malick Sidibé’s effervescent Bamako cool kids. Here, the references have multiplied

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  picks September 16, 2020

  Margaux Valengin

  “Sang Tu Erres,” the French title of Margaux Valengin’s show, translates as “Blood You Wander.” Phonetically, it sounds like sanctuaire, or “sanctuary”—but there’s no sense of refuge in Valengin’s paintings, in which organs unfold and animals glower. Hers is a chimeric universe of troubling hybrids and uncanny illusions. Anatomy becomes macabre, perverse, easily invaded; the female body is severed and hollowed out, like some Victorian-era illustrated physiological study.

  The nine canvases on view warp the body and unsettle the psyche: In The Newly Born Woman (all works 2020)—named after Hélène

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  picks July 03, 2020

  Mirak Jamal

  Mohsen Jamal (b. 1941) began painting pastorals after he emigrated with his family from Tehran to Germany, fleeing Iran’s turbulent revolution. His son, Mirak Jamal (b. 1979), has been carving out a path as an artist for himself in Berlin. In this show, their respective oeuvres are juxtaposed, providing alternate ways of understanding diaspora through creative expression.

  A postcardlike scene hung against a painted lavender backdrop is the fulcrum of the exhibition. Completed by the elder artist in 1986, it is titled Römerberg, after the village where the Jamals first settled. The charged

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  interviews October 23, 2019

  Kiki Smith

  During this interview, Kiki Smith was multitasking, wrestling with a cat collar and making granola in preparation for an imminent trip to Europe. The American artist was crossing the Atlantic to finalize several exhibitions, including a survey at the Monnaie de Paris that will be on view until February 9, 2020. The show features one hundred works—including two courtyard-placed sculptures—created between 1980 and this year. The Paris mint is a fitting location in which to spotlight Smith’s work, given her personal interest in coins and medallions, which she happens to collect. Using what she

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  previews May 2019

  “SHIOTA CHIHARU: THE SOUL TREMBLES”

  Curated by Kataoka Mami

  In Shiota Chiharu’s Uncertain Journey, 2016, keys dangle from endless arteries of bright-red wool bursting irrepressibly from metal boats. Her macabre and chillingly elegiac installation In Silence, 2008, features a burnt piano and chairs snarled in black thread. Obsessively dense webs are the Berlin-based artist’s signature, and six of her monumental pieces will be presented this summer alongside twenty years’ worth of sculpture, photography, drawing, and set design in her largest solo showcase to date. The exhibition’s title refers, with evident anxiety, to the precarious

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  picks February 13, 2019

  Peter Lindbergh and Alberto Giacometti

  “A portrait is never the person,” Peter Lindbergh once wrote. “What is captured, I think, is your relationship with the person.” This premise—that the subject beheld is a prism through which one may understand the beholder, as much as vice versa—grounds an exhibition that couples visions separated by a fifty-year gap: that of the aforementioned German-born photographer, known for his unretouched, pared-down images of models and actresses, and that of the Swiss-born sculptor Alberto Giacometti, who studied under Antoine Bourdelle and mingled with the Surrealist avant-garde. The exhibition features

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  picks October 29, 2018

  Dave Heath

  Rather than defining the metropolis by way of its architecture, cultural institutions, or communities, Dave Heath understood the city as a container for those wrestling with melancholic isolation. While serving as a machine gunner in Korea at age twenty-one, he photographed fellow soldiers—lit with an almost painterly Renaissance glow—in moments of self-reflection during cease-fires. Being part of a larger body heightens, rather than resolves, alienation. Heath photographed subjects in Philadelphia, Chicago, Kansas City, and New York, most often in Washington Square Park, but instead

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  picks October 02, 2017

  Ari Marcopoulos

  “I am considering the filmic quality of still photographs, making fast photocopies and slower color pigment prints,” writes Ari Marcopoulos in the introduction to his exhibition here. The gallery’s walls are papered with newsprint images in long, neat rows. There’s a sense of an archive unfolding, but one with a delightfully scattershot approach. If we detect anything recurrent in Marcopoulos’s work, it’s a tenderness toward his cast of mostly nonfamous characters: young skaters, athletes, and rappers, sometimes outfitted in loose hoodies or low-slung jeans. Meanwhile, snippets of text—via

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  picks July 06, 2017

  Kaye Donachie

  Glasgow-born, London-based painter Kaye Donachie threads her work with a pantheon of real and fictional heroines, from German Expressionist poetess Henriette Hardenberg to Hari, a character from Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris. Her female protagonists are executed in a crepuscular palette, sometimes disrupted by bright gashes of color. Although human figuration is central, the compositions openly play with interiority—their dreamlike superpositions and fades feel cinematic, as if constructed from layers of negatives. The paintings are vividly gestural but contemplative, intimiste.

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