Is it more apparent from Paris that Nancy Dwyer’s sculpture is as much a product of rap culture as it is an extension of recent media art? She owes more to Public Enemy’s lyrics than to Ed Ruscha’s deployment of found language. It is particularly evident from this exhibition that Dwyer’s visual vocabulary does not constitute a simulation or a critical appropriation—that it is in no way a deconstruction of the language of the mass media. Her speech comes directly out of the hard-core culture of conflict that gives the words a new power.

This is a culture that does not make the word into a

The inaugural show at this new space contains 44 works by Robert Ryman, executed between 1958 and 1991 (some of which are being shown here for the first time). Instead of presenting the paintings chronologically, the show’s curator Urs Raussmüller juxtaposed different formats and dates as he did in the Hallen für neue Kunst in Schaffhausen, Switzerland, where he serves as director. What is immediately striking in this vast, naturally lit space—an environment of concerted but unaffected neutrality—is the restricted polychromy of Ryman’s art, which is all too often relegated to the monochrome

Some fifteen years ago, Michel Seuphor recalls, his dealer and friend Denise René described him in a biographical note for a catalogue as one of the rare pioneers still around from the ’20s, but who was “as unrecognized in the visual arts as in literature.” Today, at the age of 91, Seuphor remains quite proud of this distinction, even if, as René’s current homage demonstrates, it’s not exactly true any more.

Born in Antwerp in 1901, he literally came of age with the members of the European avant-garde. At 17 he launched himself in amateur journalism with a magazine in defense of Flemish language