Sarah Moroz

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  print September 2022

  Ella Bergmann-Michel

  German artist Ella Bergmann-Michel (1896–1971) experimented with collage and assemblage in the tumultuous era of the Weimar Republic, configuring her own compelling visual vocabulary. The results were evidenced in the show “De l’eau à la lumière, de Dada au Constructivisme” (From Water to Light, from Dada to Constructivism), which featured nearly thirty works made between 1920 and 1926. She and her husband, Robert Michel, met in 1917 while studying at the Grand-Ducal Saxon School for Fine Arts, Weimar, one of only two German art schools to accept women, and stayed on when it merged with the

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  picks August 17, 2022

  “Homage to David Tudor”

  Peppered with large-scale sculptures, the sprawling property of French artist and collector Bernar Venet also contains a gallery space to host summer exhibitions. Having previously featured Minimalists and Conceptual artists like Robert Morris, Lawrence Weiner, and Fred Sandback, Venet this year showcases a collective work by avant-garde composer David Tudor, artist Jackie Matisse (Henri’s granddaughter), and filmmaker Molly Davies. (Bafflingly, the exhibition is billed to Tudor only.) Sea Tails, 1983, is a billowing installation of Matisse’s handpainted kites, scrappy and hung in harlequin

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  picks August 11, 2022

  Judith Joy Ross

  Judith Joy Ross’s portraits radiate a gentle beauty and melancholic solemnity rich with with influences; Ross is particularly fond of Eugène Atget, and she uses the same complex, alchemical printing method as Ansel Adams. Her first major series, “Eurana Park, Weatherly, Pennsylvania,” 1982-85, features wistful swimsuited adolescents, all slouched shoulders, still-damp skin, and flyaway hair. The youthful clamminess is elevated by the rigor of the photographer’s aesthetic—curator Joshua Chuang notes the tonalities’ “steely delicacy”—and imbued, too, with a sensitive humanistic candor.

  Starting in

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  picks June 22, 2022

  Xaviera Simmons

  In Xaviera Simmons’s debut solo exhibition in France, the New York-based artist has created a fresh inventory of images based on ancestral ones. Each photograph by Simmons contains, and features, a historical photograph selected from the AFRO American Newspapers’ astonishing 130-year-old archive. This massive cache preserves the legacy of a publication that documented news of and for the Black community in the Baltimore region since the late nineteenth century (it continues today, still run by the same family). Providing a robust counterpoint to exclusionary white media, the AFRO’s annals

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  print Summer 2022

  Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe

  Growing up in Accra, Ghana, Otis Kwame Kye Quaicoe was an avid viewer of westerns. These formative films came to mind when, during the social-justice uprisings of 2020—which the artist witnessed firsthand, having moved from Ghana to Oregon in 2017—he read coverage of a protest by the Compton Cowboys, activists who describe themselves as “a collective of lifelong friends on a mission to uplift their community through horseback and farming lifestyle, all the while highlighting the rich legacy of African-Americans in equine and western heritage.” Quaicoe’s encounter with that folklore—anchored in

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  interviews May 13, 2022

  Annette Messager

  Throughout a formidable career that spans six decades, Annette Messager has reconceived everything things—down puffers, bras, stuffed animals—into ambivalent emblems of collective dysfunction and desire. In her atelier in Malakoff, just south of the Paris perimeter, she toils between the playful and the macabre, between parody and critique, mining personal obsessions and slyly veering into social transgression. Below, the artist—whose latest show, “Comme si” (As If), runs from May 11 to August 21 at the Lille Métropole Musée d'Art Moderne (LaM) in France—discusses coping with angst, the pitfalls

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  picks April 14, 2022

  “Louise Bourgeois x Jenny Holzer”

  In this exhibition, Louise Bourgeois’s work is presented through Jenny Holzer’s curatorial vision—with an assist from Kunstmuseum Basel’s Anita Haldeman—thus drawing parallels between the two artists’ use of the written word as an art form unto itself. During a press conference, Holzer recalled being marked by Bourgeois’s sculpture Femme Maison, 1982, and meeting the formidable Frenchwoman in person in the 1980s (“she was not playing”). The exhibition’s subtitle—“The Violence of Handwriting Across a Page”—accentuates the forceful charge of self-expression, even when masquerading behind wry humor.

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  print April 2022

  Maja Bajevic

  In her book Everybody (2021), Olivia Laing describes corporeality as involving a “system of control and punishment that is invisible until you happen to transgress it in some way.” Maja Bajevic would likely agree. Born in Sarajevo, she arrived Paris in the 1990s and remained through the Yugoslav Wars. Since then, she has been grappling with the shattering effects of violence on personal identity. In new works created for her exhibition “Echos,” Bajevic conjured, through video and installation, the anxiety stemming from collective sociopolitical crises (so many to choose from). Sampling from

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  picks March 17, 2022

  “Cottagecore”

  The home—as Carmen Maria Machado writes in her 2019 memoir In the Dream House, a queer love story gone rogue—“is never apolitical. It is conceived, constructed, occupied, and policed by people with power, needs, and fears.” During the height of the pandemic, the Cottagecore lifestyle spoke to the needs and fears of many people sheltering in place, its leisurely diversions marking a brief interruption (if only by force of circumstance) in the status quo of relentless productivity. While Cottagecore has been criticized for circulating images of nostalgia and for romanticizing traditionally gendered

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  print March 2022

  James Barnor

  From an early age, James Barnor, the nimble portraitist born in 1929 in Ghana, admired the way wedding photographers and police photographers alike commanded a scene. He apprenticed for a photographer cousin and eventually opened his own studio in Accra. Barnor highlighted “the fragmented experience of modernity and diaspora,” as curator Renée Mussai noted in an introductory text to the 2015 monograph James Barnor: Ever Young. The artist subtly harnessed the collective joy experienced in the wake of Ghana’s independence in 1957, as political consciousness and anticolonial movements swept the

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  interviews February 23, 2022

  Aline Kominsky-Crumb

  A family affair, “Sauve qui peut ! (Run for Your Life),” on view at David Zwirner in Paris through March 26, brings together the work of Aline Kominsky-Crumb; her husband, cartoonist Robert Crumb; and their daughter, artist Sophie Crumb. The ensemble includes spontaneous scribbles on paper placemats, dense excerpts of comics scarred with whiteout, photobooth snapshots of the then-young couple, as well as new work—such as a commission in which Aline and Sophie recount their respective abortions (profits from the show will go toward a women’s health organization). An unabashed over-sharer whose

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  interviews February 11, 2022

  Graciela Iturbide

  “Heliotropo 37,” at Paris’s Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, is named after the address of Graciela Iturbide’s Mexico City studio, a place vibrantly outfitted with folk art and plants within a brick fortress designed by her son, Mauricio Rocha (he did the exhibition scenography, too). “Helio means light; tropo means something that goes around: It just so happens I’m on a street whose name perfectly corresponds with photography,” Iturbide marveled over Zoom while smoking from her couch. On view from February 12 to May 29, 2022, the survey spans two hundred images, plus an exhibition-specific