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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Historical

picks June 20, 2017

Chiharu Shiota

Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota has likened her artistic practice with yarn to that of a calligrapher. It’s a fitting parallel: Shiota trained in painting before gravitating toward three-dimensionality. She studied in Braunschweig, Germany, under Marina Abramović, and later in Berlin, where she lives today. Her immersive environments and intricately wrought objects, enigmatic yet deeply physical, are the results of painstaking labor. Shiota’s current exhibition, consisting almost entirely of works produced this year, occupies the main gallery and its annex. Destination, 2017, is a site-specific,

picks June 01, 2017

“Cholet–New York”

François Morellet, who died last year, designated himself the “freak child of Mondrian and Picabia.” Morellet created grid-based paintings and abstract planar compositions that look sober and rigorous yet reflect the artist’s declaration that “art is frivolous even when it takes itself seriously.” Upon entering the gallery (the exhibition extends to Kamel Mennour’s Pont de lodi space), one sees three square oil-on-wood pieces from 1958, 1969, and 1970, hung on patterned wallpaper, titled Trames, 1972. The adjacent room contains a vitrine of decorative mosaics photographed at the Alhambra, which

picks April 10, 2017

Michel Nedjar

Self-taught artist Michel Nedjar is the son of a tailor and the grandson of a schmatess, or second-hand clothier. Given this history, his recurrent use of recycled textiles carries a sense of inevitability. His earliest recrafted poupée, or doll, was a broken-off leg from his sister’s toy. Nedjar interred this shamanistic fetish in the backyard then dug it back up. Burial and retrieval are persistent themes in this career-wide show, which highlights collage, assemblage, found objects, muck, and bright stitching. Nedjar’s composite works double as reliquaries for his own life as well as mementos

picks April 03, 2017

Helmut Newton

The French Riviera is a fitting context in which to exhibit Helmut Newton—few other places effect that particular mix of vulgarity and glamour. The photographer readily embraced this combination, as he was a Côte d’Azur dweller himself (a house near Saint Tropez in 1964, a Monaco residence in 1981). The exhibition provides a sampling of his nudes, fashion photography, and portraits, both silver-gelatin and laser-jet prints, plus a vitrine of Polaroids. Some of the first works presented are masculine portraits shot from the 1990s: from the searing gaze of actor Ralph Fiennes, Vanity Fair, Venice

picks March 13, 2017

Vincent Perez

Identity in today’s world is more muddled than ever by sociopolitical mayhem, but Vincent Perez takes a plainspoken approach to this predicament. His recent series “The Parisians,” 2016, photographed around Paris’s metro Château Rouge in an African neighborhood, mixes street style with an alfresco studio feel. (The Swiss-born Perez himself is a curious but respectful outsider; moreover, he is known as an actor/director in France). Each subject brandishes a bright palette of garments and accessories: taxi-yellow nails, red headscarves, pink paisley button-downs. Their hues are accentuated by the

picks February 07, 2017

Cy Twombly

In the November 30, 1978, edition of the SoHo Weekly News, William Zimmer wrote of Cy Twombly’s paintings, “One is reminded of graffiti on men’s room walls . . . brutish and even downright nasty—a compliment.” This institution, having dedicated two prior exhibitions to Twombly’s oeuvre (in 1988 and 2004), offers the first major retrospective of this artist since his death in 2011. This completist array of 140 works gives us expressive canvases, multimedia sculptures, and placid photographs culled from both private and public collections.

Twombly began his career by deploying industrial paint.

picks December 14, 2016

Wojciech Zamecznik

Multidisciplinary and experimental, Wojciech Zamecznik made his mark on the postwar Polish art scene by playfully exploring the boundaries of photography. Rather than encapsulating a fixed moment, he treated the medium as a jumping-off point for creating innovative graphic forms. Opening with self-portraits and the poster design for the historic show “Family of Man,” the exhibition includes more than two hundred works that reveal the breadth of both his process and his output. His earliest photos unfurl across Europe: His wife, Halina, is seated among high-contrast stripes of light in Bulgaria

interviews November 08, 2016

Rodrigo Braga

During this year’s edition of Nuit Blanche, Brazilian artist Rodrigo Braga inaugurated Inland Sea, 2016, an al fresco installation in Paris of forty-five stones carefully plucked from French quarries, weighing between 1,100 pounds and six tons apiece. The stones are placed in the shallow pool on the esplanade between the Palais de Tokyo and the Musée d’Art Moderne. With the Eiffel Tower looming nearby, Braga’s selection of prehistoric boulders provides a counterpoint to the metropolitan environment, which is ordinarily smoothed of geological traces. The raw and the man-made constantly face off

picks August 18, 2016

Louis Stettner

Photographer Louis Stettner produced a diverse oeuvre in black and white, from the streets of postwar Paris to forest landscapes. Born in Brooklyn in 1922, he frequented the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reading room as an adolescent to scrutinize prints by Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, and Ansel Adams. In 1946, he studied under sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris but switched to film as a proximal education in photography. He connected to both French humanist photography and American street photography and traveled regularly between the two countries.

Stettner excelled at locating introspective

picks August 15, 2016

Eugen Gabritschevsky

Eugen Gabritschevsky was a relative unknown until he was discovered by Jean Dubuffet, who bought seventy-one of the artist’s works within a decade. Gabritschevsky’s well-to-do, cultivated childhood in Russia initially led to a brilliant scientific career. In 1925 he started a postdoctoral program in New York, working as a geneticist when the field was still in its infancy. Gabritschevsky, however, was hospitalized in Zurich for schizophrenia in 1931, and then transferred to the Eglfing-Haar Psychiatric Hospital, just outside of Munich, where he remained for the rest of his life. In a 1946 letter,

picks June 29, 2016

“Apollinaire, the Vision of the Poet”

Guillaume Apollinaire was a lightning rod within European avant-garde circles. This exhibition explores a number of early modernist works, made between 1902–18, when Apollinaire was writing about art. His thinking was so entangled with the artistic culture of the time that in 1916, Alberto Saviano, Giorgio de Chirico’s brother, deemed Apollinaire an “homme époque.” Born in 1880 in Rome to a blue-blooded Polish mother, he became a Parisian cultural staple, contributing to art magazines and creating his influential calligrams—diagrams or pictures made from words. Upon encountering Juan Gris’s

picks May 05, 2016

Manuel Scano Larrazàbal

The inaugural exhibition of this newly opened space, titled “Pantomime,” features recent works by the Italian Venezuelan artist Manuel Scano Larrazàbal. The show’s centerpiece, Untitled (all works 2016) is an intricately designed mobile made of slender rods hung from nylon threads. The whole apparatus is animated by a rejiggered fan that prods this delicate sculpture into gentle movement. A rainbow of markers, taped to the threads that dangle to the floor, spin and dart over a white sheet of paper laid below. The bopping felt tips carry out a frenetic dance, leaving pointillist marks and vivid

picks April 28, 2016

“Le Précieux Pouvoir des Pierres” (The Precious Power of Stones)

There’s a collective fascination with stones and minerals. We’ve seen it in childhood collections of curious rocks, with rituals both meditative and occult, and at the very core of our desire to try to understand what our planet—and even our universe—is made of. This exhibition, “Le Précieux pouvoir des pierres” (The Precious Power of Stones), highlights our protean curiosity. Laurent Grasso’s eerie and undated Studies into the Past—a faux-Renaissance oil painting in which a boulder is depicted hanging like a specter in midair—sets the tone for this group show that deals with materiality and

Sarah Moroz