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...
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 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....
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...
"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...
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...
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,” 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...
In January, 2012, National Geographic ran a piece called "TWINS: Alike But Not Alike," that used the August, 2011 Twins Days Festival (held annually in Twinsburg, Ohio) as a launching pad for a discussion of the latest scientific advances in twin studies, including...
Perhaps the most impressive thing about Samuel Bayer’s series of photographic “Triptychs,” recently on view at ACE Gallery Beverly Hills, is the complexity of the meditation on desire and representation that they can engender in a [male] viewer. These 16 12-foot...
Catherine Opie enunciates the intentions and ideas behind her current body of 2012-2013 works with the first two images the viewer encounters—one a portrait, the other an abstracted landscape that could loosely be described as meditative. Lawrence (the conceptual...
Sonic Fountain, the centerpiece of Doug Aitken’s show (all works 2013) includes a large, round hole jack-hammered into the cement floor and filled with water. From above, a system of pipes with five spigots drips water into this small pool. The drops fall in...
Dorothea Tanning was a painter, printmaker, sculptor, set designer, writer and poet who died last year at the age of 101. Best known for her enigmatic works of the 1940s and 1950s, which feature women and girls involved with strange animals and animated swaths of...
Richard Jackson is a maniac with paint. His current retrospective is a testament to the gargantuan ambitions and massive amounts of energy he has displayed over a 40-plus-year career. The exhibition’s title, “Ain’t Painting a Pain,” is indicative of his commitment to...
Fans of Art Spiegelman’s seminal graphic novel Maus can be forgiven for writing off Spiegelman as a one-hit wonder. After all, before producing the two volumes of the Holocaust memoir, which almost single-handedly turned the lowly comic book into a serious literary...
“Abstraction talks her head off. She has a lot to say.” You might not hear her right away, but Jennifer Wynne Reeves does. “I tune out or listen,” she adds, in the penciled text within a painting, “rattled by her noisy silence.” She is also silently talking back. She...
Challenging assumptions about figure and ground, nature and industry, Robert Ortbal’s “Hide and Seek” reveals the instincts of a scientist exploring quirky bits of flotsam that speak to our human condition. Ortbal’s hybrid constructions mesh organic and man-made...
Kelly Barrie’s hybrid process at first seems antithetical to photography and its ability to stop time, yet it is through his improvisations—like the nimbleness required by a skater or graffiti writer—that his work ingeniously engages a series of paradoxes. Rather than...
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