Egan Frantz’s show, “The Oat Paintings,” provides a possible opening into a discussion of the nature of political art: how we distinguish it from among the myriad latent political aspects of most other art; how we recognize and define its characteristics; how it...
Like many artists who have spent most or a significant portion of their career outside the U.S. or U.K. or the major art capitals, Jimmie Durham may be less than familiar to many of us who (until now) have had only the most fleeting (or even anonymous) contact with...
Sometimes a powerful image is enough – not simply to focus and arrest attention, but to shift the narrative, move the world, or certainly the viewer’s perspective on it. A great image can re-make that world or deliver an entirely new one. The watch word at this moment...
If there is a single word that could sum up the the career of László Moholy-Nagy, it would probably be refraction. The refraction of light is an obvious key, both with respect to Moholy’s overall formal approach and technical approach to his preferred media (and not...
The plaintive title of Llyn Foulkes’ current exhibition – his first for Sprüth Magers – suggests we might be in for some mournful, if not downright bitter, riffs on laboriously trodden themes. This is not necessarily a drastic departure from the surreal dissonance of...
Metamorphosis can refer to processes both natural and supernatural; but the works in Douglas Tausik Ryder’s exhibition of this title, while they reference the commonly understood biomorphic dimension, also encompass a much larger domain: the metamorphosis between...
If it feels as if it’s been years since you saw work by Beverly Pepper, it probably has. I don’t think she was even included in the Hauser, Wirth & Schimmel “Revolution In the Making” debut show. Not revolutionary enough? Or too far from the madding crowd? Pepper...
For those of us who grew up in America in the second half of the 20th century, especially the decades of the 1960s and 1970s, it would have been impossible to go through middle or high school without stumbling across certain staple school stationery supplies. One such...
The curators of Ecstasy, Virginia Broersma, Nick Brown and Kio Griffith, characterize their show as an “exhibition and lab” (the latter aspect of which may be more prominent in a couple of the objects by Candice Lin included here); but its installation has the airy...
“My name is called Disturbance,” as Mick Jagger sang in "Street Fighting Man," and as 2016 careened into 2017, many of us wondered where exactly we stood with respect to what beckoned immediately across the horizon and came to grips with an unsettling notion that we...
As 2016 winds to a close, a lot of us are looking back on the past year, and (with some trepidation) forward to 2017, and wondering how we managed to arrive at this particular time and place. ‘How could we have missed….?’ – fill in the blank. The short answer is that...
Doug Aitken sings the earth and cosmos electric in a mid-career retrospective that could be a Pick of the Year exhibition. The Geffen space, which has never looked better, was entirely made over for the show – an immersive odyssey to mirror Aitken’s own process with...
Matthew Rosenquist knows his way around the block. I mean that in every sense. He’s acutely attuned to a certain street culture and attitude in common circulation both in L.A. and elsewhere – a suburbanized (and slightly desperate) vernacular observed not only in...
In Maria Lassnig’s career, we trace a continuously evolving negotiation between the conscious self and the alternately concrete and conceptualized other. The body of Lassnig’s work – evolving over the course of her long career from her first expressionist essays into...
R. H. Quaytman’s Morning: Chapter 30 has an assertive, unrelenting horizontal presence, but it really represents a kind of constellation – coextensive with the larger universe of associations that populate Quaytman’s entire body of work. That constellation may be...
Jeffrey Vallance was already something of a legend when I first became acquainted with his work – an ‘interventionist’ style of conceptual art in which the performance became a kind of deconstructed cultural inquiry. My first impression came by way of captioned...
Sometimes the bravest show can be one that parses its meanings seemingly by millimeters in the sheer sense structures to be elucidated between one work and the next. This is in pronounced contrast to the relatively unfiltered cascades of sensation that dominate many...
How do we put this? A Guy’s gotta paint! And the Guy who’s gotta paint has clearly gotta be obsessed about it! And maybe a few other things besides painting… like SEX! I mean a Guy’s gotta be inspired to paint! And then he’s gotta get through the stuff that fuels,...
Subscribe to our weekly Gallery Rounds Newsletter for new Reviews, Art opps, Art Events, & More every week!