While sagas of personal transformation are a staple of recent nonfiction filmmaking—from U.N. peacekeeper Roméo Dallaire’s inexorable drift into despair (and back) in the CBC’s Rwanda documentary Shake Hands With the Devil, to crack-mom Kirk White’s unexpected ascent...
FILM: In the Shadows, Cutie and the Boxer
Most stories about larger-than-life male artists and their girlfriends/wives share a familiar arc—he overshadows her. When Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner bought a house in East Hampton, Pollock got to work in the barn, Krasner painted in the bedroom. It was only...
Books: To (Richard) Hell and Back
Richard Hell swaggers up the side-walk, as if in a private movie that is being played out for the pleasure of others, as if he is being watched—which he is. Full of himself. Happy: yes, I suppose that’s another word for it. And why wouldn’t he be happy? He is about to...
ENCOUNTERS: HANS RICHTER
Some artists make Masterpieces. Others compile Oeuvres. Still others live Lives; if they (and we) are fortunate, those Lives are lived at the center of their times, or at least their times’ artistic practices. Like most Europeans of his time, the Berlin-born Hans...
Yvonne Venegas
Shot from behind a glass partition, a girl with long blond hair sits alone at the edge of an empty pool. Her back is to the camera; her legs create ripples in the blue water. Where the pool ends, a golf course begins. The setting is obviously one of wealth. This color...
Florian Morlat
There are two clues Florian Morlat is up to something different with his show(s) at Cherry and Martin, which held court there for two months. With overlap between the shows, and some work reappearing in slightly different configurations, the second made clear a dry,...
Heavy Metal
While the exhibition’s title immediately triggers images of wild head-bangin’ rockers wailing away at unheard of decibels, for five African-American abstract sculptors it was a call in response to the use of metal in their work, guided by ancestral memory and tapping...
Kirsten Everberg
With eight new oil-and-enamel paintings, Kirsten Everberg continues her practice of exploring filmic images as a means of exercising her interest in perception, memory and narrative. Visually, her paintings present an eerie absence. In Everberg’s hands, film scenes...
Kenneth Tam
Kenneth Tam produces strange and consistently intriguing work. His videos, which are driven by encounters with strangers that the artist has met online, are investigations of the negotiations and power dynamics that occur during uncomfortable social situations....
A New Sculpturalism
Part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time initiative, MOCA’s “A New Sculpturalism” exhibition is an attempt to capture the tectonic shift of the last three decades from postmodern design to the new construction technologies and parametric forms found in Southern...
Adrián Villar Rojas
"La Inocencia de los Animales" is a staging of our anxiety regarding our continued survival as a species. The installation piece by Adrián Villar Rojas, one module of “Expo 1: New York” curated by Triple Canopy, is presented in a larger collection of work that...
Eric Fischl
Rising to prominence in New York in the 1980s, Eric Fischl's dramatically composed, challenging works portrayed a steamy, unwholesome underbelly to suburbia—a vision of the nation's great middle class as throbbing, voyeuristic adolescents, impassive temptresses and...
Charles Fréger
At first glance Charles Fréger’s “Wilder Mann”—an exhibition filled with photographs of furry giants and frolicking monsters—may seem inconsequential. Yes, the work is fluffy and intentionally entertaining on the surface, but it goes much deeper. After one fully...
The Encyclopedic Palace
“The Encyclopedic Palace,” Massimiliano Gioni’s tour de force at the center of the 55th Biennale di Venezia, is an amazing show about fixations, obsessions, the passions of desire and the transformative capacity of the mind's eye. It is a wonderfully vast array of...