In the March/April issue of Artillery, I argued that the subversion of cutesy cartoon aesthetics is almost always compelling, since the notion of a visual language with the power to connote primal emotions through ancient, universal strokes remains resonant despite...
You recognize it before you know what to do with it. A cartoon, a flower, a line that feels like it’s been there before. Kitsch comes to mind, maybe, but it doesn’t quite stick. Or it sticks and then loosens. The image doesn’t hold you where you expect. It keeps...
I parked my car on a random street in the nearby neighborhood, and as I was walking to the Venice Room, I passed by a place matter-of-factly called BREW. I had to peep the menu, because that bold, straightforward name simply struck me — naturally, they serve beer,...
All of Marina Stern’s work is weighty. The objects in her intensely matte, sleek oil paintings and densely packed graphite drawings receive an egalitarian touch. In contrast to often airy and delicate subjects—paper, string, and flowers—Stern’s quality of paint is...
At first, the installation in London’s Whitechapel Gallery seems childish: flimsy cardboard walls covered in forests, foliage and animals, all painted with loose brushwork, like set design the adults painted for their kids’ school play. In Candice Lin’s world of...
The Smithsonian, the nation’s cultural voice established by Congress in 1846, is under attack. Financially seeded by Englishman James Smithson, who was ostensibly enamored by the great American Experiment, it has since morphed into the world's largest museum,...
The title of this exhibition, “Disappear Here,” is a reference to Bret Easton Ellis’s novel Less Than Zero. It alludes to the reality of anonymity in a city in which fame and glamour are the reigning myths. However, the works on hand only reflect these themes in a...
At the center of “Dew Point,” the current exhibition at François Ghebaly, hangs artist Lily Clark’s Inyo (2025), a sculpture of much poetry and power. Clark suspends a large hunk of alabaster from the rafters where water drips from the rock, filling up a steel basin...
“Thus time goes by,” Robert Filliou writes at the end of Whispered Art History (1963), the short document in which he declares January 17th the official birthday of art. In Filliou’s telling, art begins not with genius or mastery but with an ordinary gesture made...
Few exhibitions make the gap between the United States and the rest of the world’s art capitals so blatant than “Sandra Vásquez de la Horra: The Awake Volcanoes” at Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Pegged as the artist’s solo debut in the US, the exhibition...
I saw the sun saved and erased at the same time. In Zoe Koke’s recent paintings, oil becomes a way of holding sun. Here oil paint behaves like a desert light fixed in place, absorbing rather than illuminating. In one of her new paintings, Rainbow (2026), the desert...
Amelia Lockwood’s ceramics push up against the natural constraints of their medium in novel ways. Rather than the earthbound, closed forms associated with this medium, we get vine-like, open lattices, expanding outward from a central axis. These echo Rococo decorative...
Powers’ paintings—which range from landscapes to still lives to paintings of mechanical detritus—recall Impressionism, albeit in its most restrained instances: more Pissarro than Monet. That is, there’s a withholding quality towards light and a painterly restraint...
The centerpiece of this show is From Here On Out (2025): a large, ramshackle, free-standing, scrap-wood armature supporting two plexiglass panels, embedded with four small assemblage-paintings, themselves containing collaged, miscellaneous photographic imagery...
R. Crumb’s “tales” (even filtered through psychedelics and cannabinoids) weren’t always so paranoid—though they were frequently calamitous. The street-hip graphic domain Crumb freely improvised during the 1960s and 1970s across densely cross-hatched black-andwhite...
I felt dizzy at mosie romney’s show “every Spiral has its law” at Sebastian Gladstone. I could chalk it up to external factors (fatigue, harsh gallery lighting), but I suspect that the work itself was the incubator of disorientation. My previous visits to the space,...
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