picks November 01, 2018

Henrik Olesen

Continuing his interest in Foucault, which has featured heavily in his work since the 1990s, Henrik Olesen has staged his first solo show in Berlin in some years in the panopticon-like room of the Schinkel Pavillon, a former GDR building offering a panoramic view of the city center. Today, the room is filled with sculptural objects, including Plexiglas and wooden boxes silk-screened with images in neon colors, as in No Mouth No Tongue Box (all works 2018), alongside mundane consumer products such as cardboard boxes and milk cartons that function as ready-mades, painted over by the artist. The

picks May 16, 2018

Danny McDonald

Danny McDonald’s latest exhibition appears to be informed by the program In Search of… by Leonard Nimoy. It is an extension of the artist’s established oeuvre, which consists of pop culture splattered over various ready-mades altered or detourned to make absurdist commentaries on the toxic American landscape, all while laughing at it, like a late-night comedy skit. Here, toys based on male cinematic icons largely associated with the baby boom are recontextualized to equal parts banal and horrifying effect.

An amputated hand swears an oath on a bible, guillotined by a paper cutter as a naked

picks January 19, 2018

LaKela Brown

The jewelry and body parts that make up LaKela Brown’s exhibition resemble, on first glance, the kind of historical artifacts that one might find in a prestigious museum. However, upon closer inspection, these plaster reliefs present a meditation on how such objects are historicized, represented, and abstracted in a museological context. Embedded in the eleven individual works are different casts of objects commonly associated with hip-hop culture in the 1990s, when the artist was growing up, including bamboo earrings, gold-capped teeth, rope necklace chains, and chicken heads taken from a

Steven Warwick