Grouping art by medium is always too obvious, even when the medium in question has the pizzazz of electric light. This exhibition focuses on the years 1964-1970 but does not, otherwise, establish a clear throughline. Experiments with electric light were, indeed,...
Most figurative painting is terrible but these are surprisingly good. Brisco’s restrained brushwork produces a flat clarity that recalls Alex Katz but with harsh moody colors and lonesome figures which echo Edward Hopper’s sadsacks. Suburban homes appear as...
These paintings have a slight hamfistedness, which suggests distance from their alternately whimsical, mystical, Modernist, and Premodern sources. The allusions and references here—like Lipke’s interpolation of Neolithic-era petroglyphs into Kandinsky-esque painting –...
A mechanical broom wielded by a robotic arm sweeps across the floor under the corner of a custom-made carpet shaped like India. In an adjoining room, an enormous inflatable Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man lies face-down adjacent to a neon sign which reads “DIASPORA.” A...
Don’t let the cute animals fool you; these paintings are not so innocent. A vague sense of foreboding permeates these otherwise joyful works. In Iadevaia’s last show, climate apocalypse hovered in his portentous smokey-pink...
Michael E. Smith’s unassuming, poetic sculptures are late capitalist Zen koans: riddles with no answer but which nevertheless spark a moment of satori. For instance, a milk carton covered in mirrors seems to suggest that we are all the lost children. But is this a...
This show has some of the best paintings that Rema Ghuloum has made, but that might be a problem. She’s honed this language—obsessively detailed, rainbow-hued, color field paintings—past the point of perfection. These paintings glow, but the unfinished, muddy, and...
Sometimes art can just be a weird, cool thing that happened one time. Like, what if you took apart a three-part sectional, stacked it vertically, and poured eight gallons of house paint through it. This is a dumb idea, but dumb stuff can be fun. With art, one plus one...
The word trippy comes to mind here, but it might not actually apply. The quasi-mythological take on nature and the vibrating, prismatic color naturally suggest psychedelia but, overall, these are too controlled to be visionary. They feel, at times, like a collision of...
The slapdash brushwork of Gabriel Madan’s work suggests a personal but ultimately fleeting investment in his subjects. The style and content are both Pop but not too Pop - an oddball mix of semi-famous celebrities and obscure kitsch. By loosely hand-painting...
Some shows suck, and some shows barely avoid sucking. Austin Lee seems capable of great things while failing by a long mile. The paintings depict brightly hued, crying, Gumby-like cartoon figures. They are clearly intended to be emotive but fail to elicit emotion; the...
This show feels like something that I would have walked in and out of quickly about twenty years ago. The paintings—hazy process-based geometric abstractions—artfully avoid the conventions of painting without actually saying anything. The pink prints look like...
Psychedelic experience has some distinct qualities. One may experience hallucinations of shifting yet repetitive imagery. Random objects become supercharged with symbolic meaning. Reality dissolves into the purely visual. Time itself is revealed as an abstract...
In an episode of Jerry Seinfeld’s Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Louis CK takes Seinfeld out on his boat on the Hudson River. Looking across the water and admiring the skyline, Louis says, “New York makes me crazy. I love New York City. I love the different brick...
In his first solo show in the U.S., French artist Benoît Maire includes a video presented on a MacBook showing an image of another MacBook showing a video of the artist watching a video of Foucault on YouTube (on a MacBook). Foucault is shown praising Gaston Bachelard...
Forrest Bess (1911–77) was, by his own account, a man divided. He saw himself as containing two selves: the masculine, roughneck hard-drinking fisherman, and the sensitive painter. He believed that he could unify these parts of himself by surgically becoming a...
If you have been in any number of major cities this summer across the U.S., you might have seen a billboard with the hashtag caption #ArtEveryWhere alongside a reproduction of a famous work of art. According to the tagline on the #ArtEveryWhereUS website, this is “A...
If you have not seen Ryan Trecartin’s videos, imagine flipping at break-neck speed through 500 channels of reality TV contestants in garish makeup reading random fragments of text from the Internet out loud. More readily, you could also just go check them out on Vimeo...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!
