Jimi Dams assembled the sculpture, video, and predominantly figurative paintings and photographs that make up “DIAcussion,” his elegantly understated group show at Envoy Enterprises, with the goal of letting the art speak for itself. Read More
Imagine walking into a costume party inside Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. The theme to this group show is the brief but influential, pre-Surrealist “Pittura Metafisica” movement, and the decorations are meticulous. Read More
Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. Read More
Composer and artist Ben Vida began by writing a “score” consisting of a concrete/Dada-style series of letters and syllables. He then printed the score as a poster, and as a book, videotaped himself, Tyondai Braxton and Sara Magenheimer improvising with the meaningless but still recognizably English-based vocals to a click track, processed the voices, overlaid Read More
Old Punk on Pay Phone, a color transparency mounted on an aluminum lightbox, shows the artist Rodney Graham at almost life size. He’s standing on a sloping wet sidewalk in Vancouver, against a brick wall painted yellow and blue. His black leather jacket is covered in studs and crude lettering, his graying hair is greased up into a faux-hawk, and there’s eyeliner on his eyes. Holding the handset of a much-abused, wall-mounted pay phone to his ear, he looks off in shock—as if he’s just learned, say, that his father has died, and he is realizing for the first time that when it comes right down to it, he’d be glad to put on a necktie for his widowed mother’s sake. Read More
“The Morgenthau Plan” was an American proposal, first mooted in 1944, to partition and deindustrialize Germany after the war. It was never enacted precisely as planned, of course, but while the war was still going on, Joseph Goebbels was able to use news of the idea to rally resistance along the Western Front. “The Morgenthau Plan” is also the title of an installation that Anselm Kiefer showed at Gagosian’s new space in Le Bourget, Paris, last year, of his current show at Gagosian in Chelsea, and of several of the massive, oil-and-acrylic-on-photo-on-canvas tableaux in the show. Read More
Bob Zoell’s enameled metal boxes date back to the ’90s, but they look like omens of where we’re going. Read More
Untitled (portraits from Deviant Art), 2012, is a spring-loaded misdirection. A dark photo print under beveled matting under hand-etched glass, with the rectangle formed by the bevels overlapping a pale gray cameo-style oval, it’s almost impossible to look at. It’s much easier to see your own reflection. Read More
Take Richard Serra’s 1967 artwork Verb List, a piece consisting of 108 terms handwritten across four columns on two sheets of letter paper. It’s a kind of index to the 18 titanic formal experiments, borrowed from museums and private collections all over the world, that have been arranged to loosely recreate the feeling of the artist’s 1968 Soho loft inside David Zwirner’s distractingly opulent new building on West 20th Street. Begin with “to roll.” Scavenge an irregular, four-foot-high ingot of black rubber, scraped or torn into a sandy latex color along one corner. Lean it against the wall. The way it lists to the right brings to mind a dancer striking a supple pose, whose shape looks transitional even as it holds steady—a perfect sculptural embodiment of frozen gesture. But then the soft material reminds you that the piece, Chunk (1967) really is bending the way it looks like it’s bending, even though it’s bending too slowly to see. Read More
Bernd Ribbeck splits the difference between spirit painting and heraldry. The portentously simple geometries of his India ink drawings and small acrylic paintings have knife-sharp edges and heady if unspecific symbolism. Read More
