picks June 21, 2019

Masato Kobayashi

It’s hard to like Masato Kobayashi’s exhibition “Artist and the Model.” He paints with his own mass, making plump and messy gestural markings with his hands that culminate in abstractions and figures with fuzzy contours. The conventional format of painting is severely altered; many canvases are ruggedly attached to jagged wooden frames with long screws sticking out, adorning the gallery walls high and low in an apparent act of apostasy against “taste.” His drawings are likewise casually folded, creased, and torn. However, they don’t speak the language of camp; these works are more earnest. In

picks February 27, 2018

Shuntaro Tanikawa

“I’m a short, baldheaded old man.” This exhibition begins with a series of first-person proclamations with an impassive if slightly self-deprecating tenor, as decals on rectangular pillars. Ever suspicious of poetry after Barthes killed the author, celebrated poet Shuntaro Tanikawa grapples here with an ambivalence about being historicized in an exhibition context. And yet the show, comprising poems, notes, ephemera, audiovisual installation, and videos (all untitled and undated, excepting poems), pieces together autobiographical fragments that amount to a necessary extension of the poet himself

picks December 02, 2016

Jim Hodges

You enter the gallery, and the sound of a capella singing, without warning, echoes throughout—sweet, jubilant, evanescent. The vocalist, casually dressed like a patron, comes in, faces a wall, and starts doing his thing. The song gently defamiliarizes the exhibition context. This scene is just one element of Jim Hodges’s installation I dreamed a world and called it Love, 2016, a painfully heartfelt proposition against the wretched anxiety of the day. Lining the perimeter of the room is a series of tall polished-glass panels mounted on canvas. Hodges conceptualizes the exhibition as a slippery

picks October 28, 2016

Tetsumi Kudo

Tetsumi Kudo’s acid-colored sculptures work like chemotherapy in a carcinogenic landscape. The third presentation of the late artist’s works here gathers many of his biomorphic sculptures or phallic pets—housed in brilliantly psychedelic birdcages—and pieces that deftly shape seemingly endless lengths of thread into sperm- and mandala-like forms.

Kudo diagrams a vision of reality grounded in hermetic pseudoscience and Kafkaesque metamorphosis—he was a Situationist-style maker who believed in turning mass culture’s most banal cast-offs into viable psychic and antiauthoritarian expressions. In

picks September 23, 2016

Nick Relph

New York’s Carroll Musical Instrument Rentals, LLC answers the phone when you call the number emblazoned upon Total Piano & Organ (all works cited, 2016), a large canvas work on which the title is spelled out. The telephone is a motif throughout Nick Relph’s solo exhibition here, a symbol that functions as a conduit between absence and presence.

Flaming Frontier, which cuts through the gallery space diagonally, is made up of nineteen double-sided wooden panels, some of which bear C-prints. Pictures of telephones, as well as construction permits, disappear and reappear, phantomlike, through images

picks May 06, 2016

Carlos Motta

Carlos Motta is a necromancer. His practice involves a kind of communion with the archive, animating its traces in order to call forth the nearly moribund histories of queers of color. Hermaphrodite (8), from the series “Beloved Martina,” 2016, is a haunting 3-D-printed statuette in Greco-Roman style, based on a photograph by Nadar. Martina was a woman who, in 1803, was put on trial for hermaphroditism in a Colombian court. She is also one of the protagonists in another work, Motta’s apparitional film, Deseos, 2015. In it, Martina and a woman called Nour carry on a fictional epistolary

picks April 15, 2016

Billy Sullivan

In the intimate exhibition space of Billy Sullivan’s flirty paintings and drawings, the air is charged with a tinge of the erotic. The room is a vibrating chamber of rumors, memories: We are privy to the artist’s interior world, his tender relationships and various loves, both living and lost. Re-created from Sullivan’s personal cache of photos, seven of the ten works on display are titled after their subjects, including Cookie Mueller (Cookie, 2016) and the artist’s husband, Klaus Kertess (Klaus and Klaus, 2015–16). Sullivan’s brushstrokes are gentle and effortless—details are hazy, contours

picks December 01, 2014

Stefan Tcherepnin

Two sculptural creatures both resembling the Cookie Monster, one in deep purple and the other avocado green, are the focus of Stefan Tcherepnin’s latest show, while a third version of the character in its traditional azure lies flattened in the shape of a kidney on the floor. Above them hang inverted bundles of mulberry branches, each lit from within by a single lightbulb that casts dramatic shadows on the walls and large, scrim-like partition dividing the gallery. The lighting along with the flagrant absurdity of the figures recalls the campy films of Mike and George Kuchar. Inside the gallery’s

Taro Masushio