Pulau Bidong is a small island near Malaysia that was once a camp for more than 250,000 refugees from the Vietnam War—artist Tuan Andrew Nguyen and his family among them. It has gone feral since being closed in 1991, with dense jungle and crumbling earth...
Fay Ray often says her work is about the construction of identity, which is something a lot of artists say. But in “I AM THE HOUSE” Ray takes that premise in sublime new directions, in a series of sculptures and photo-based works that through formal materials, actions...
It’s starting to rain in Mexico City on Friday afternoon, but Rodrigo Feliz is, in fact, happy. That’s because on the second day of Material Art Fair’s fifth edition, it’s already clearly a triumph. Formerly director of Mexico City’s acclaimed Labor Gallery, Feliz has...
Looney Toons, Leger, Lewitt, and Kandinsky battle it out for aesthetic prominence across these epic and absolutely eccentric new paintings and sculptures by Rives Granade. Abstract forms, deracinated texts, and schematic signifiers festoon the gestural grounds of his...
The opening movement of “Soul Recordings” is a polka-dot revelry, a bedazzled wake-up call, a cymbal-clap altarpiece, a plastic-bead trumpet blast, and a monster of a skull-ringed, glitter-bombed orchestral chord breaking in fuchsia major. This is Ebony G. Patterson’s...
Georganne Deen did not become disillusioned by recent geopolitical events—she’s been feeling that way for a long time. It’s just that her newest paintings reflect certain newly topical aspects within the widening gyre of social entropy, expressing in both style and...
Ages-old art historical forces of the sublime and the picturesque battle it out across a suite of abstract landscapes, in about 20 fabulously chromatic, profoundly emotional, large-scale textile-based mixed media works by Merion Estes. Picturesque, because her take on...
There’s a lot to learn from Ellen Gallagher’s new exhibition. For example, it turns out Herman Melville was an Afrofuturist. And that the Atlantic Ocean is the original abstract expressionist. Also, that it is possible to make a map of something you can never see. On...
Densely fretted and motion activated and crying out for every metaphorical use of the word string from art to design, music to physics, three new bodies of work by Brian Wills expand and deepen his relationship to his material muse—colored thread. A star in the...
Along a lonely stretch of Main Street extending from Union Station to the Brewery Arts Complex, largely defined by seafood warehouses and girded by railroad tracks, sits Werkartz, a co-working pop-up venue and production space aligned with a new gig economy in which...
Sometimes a drawing is not a drawing. For example, when an artist transcends rendering and goes for something entirely more direct. In the case of Flora Kao and her unique, evocative architectural rubbings, her method of depiction is itself a tactile, durational,...
Monet’s haystacks, Baldessari’s discs, Warhol’s everything—there are a number of artists who have worked in series specifically plotted as “the same picture in different colors” throughout art history, for diverse reasons—phenomenological comparison, critique of...
We are accustomed to sight as an experience of things coming into clearer focus the longer we look at them. Images seem fuzzy, we stare, maybe squint a bit, and they sharpen up. One of the special features of paintings by Peter Lodato is that they enact the opposite....
Abstract but character-driven, tertiary and bright, super flat and deeply funny, the paintings and sculptural installations in Andy Kolar’s “Easy now.” speak to conceptual and material concerns in a uniquely satisfying, engaging dialect of modern color theory. The...