picks August 14, 2017

Marie-Louise Ekman

Though the Moderna Museet has been collecting Swedish artist Marie-Louise Ekman’s work since 1968, this is her first solo exhibition at the museum, and a refreshing one at that. Ekman has served as the artistic director of Stockholm’s Royal Dramatic Theater and the first female dean of the city’s Royal Institute of Art and is a filmmaker who has produced hilarious and popular broadcasts for Swedish television. Here, her works in painting, sculpture, and film, all of which are equally freaky and eccentric, take center stage.

For this exhibition, the main gallery is covered in huge untitled wall

picks June 07, 2017

Lena Henke

Lena Henke has made a walk-in artwork out of the rotunda, a space neither interior nor exterior, illuminated by the light from an approximately sixty-five-foot-tall glass dome. A sculptor by heart, Henke works with the architecture to make the crowds passing through—often to reach the cathedral from old town—aware of the typically overlooked space, interrupting their flow and diverting their attention.

Two oval-shaped glossy aluminum boxes, in the tradition of Donald Judd’s specific objects, stand in the pathways, blocking the two opposing entrances. From the mezzanine one story above, grains of

picks February 27, 2017

Violet Dennison

Bacteria are the scary, invisible monsters of the public sphere. They cover the earth and, even though some do good, many can be harmful. Violet Dennison’s second show at this gallery examines these microorganisms to develop a narrative around the rituals of washing, cleaning, and scrubbing, which can range from healthy body treatments to ecologically damaging routines.

In HIDE Succession (all works cited, 2017), a short video presented on a flat-screen television, the artist walks through a New York subway station following a mass of people. Shooting with a body camera, Dennison moves like a

picks January 24, 2017

Omer Fast

Organized as a dramatic walk through seven of Omer Fast’s films and videos, this show takes us into three installations, all resembling transitional spaces––an immigration office, an airport lounge, and a doctor’s waiting room. Equipped with plastic chairs and fake houseplants, they house his videos CNN Concatenated, 2002, Looking Pretty for God (After G.W.), 2008, and 5,000 Feet Is the Best, 2011, which all run on flat-screen TVs. These well-lit rooms alternate with carpeted black boxes, which host, on large projection screens, four of his more recent works: Continuity, 2012; Everything That

picks January 12, 2017

Florian Hecker

One of the most radical museum exhibitions of recent memory is by sound artist Florian Hecker. On display is not an image but a stripped-down gallery space of dark brown brick columns and two long rows of windows that flood the space with natural light. A ballet of electroacoustic motifs and sonic patterns emerges from fourteen of Hecker’s signature small black speakers to build an eight-hour choreographed digital orchestra of previous and recent works, which include NnNd (Auditory Scene Synthesis), 2009, and his two Documenta 13 contributions, Chimerization, 2012, and Chimärisation, 2012.

The

Vivien Trommer