Romanian-born, having lived through the tragic absurdities of communism, Geta Bratescu represents the strongest blending of conceptual rigor and narrative impulses. Her wide-ranging oeuvre encompasses drawing, sculpture, video, performance, collage and animated film....
Daniel Crews-Chubb’s paintings comprise enthralling convolutions of historic imagery, digital culture, and art historical modes of representation. Ancient iconography mingles with mid-century expressionism and contemporary smartphone self-portraiture in the British...
At first glance it appears as if there is nothing there. Then the eye is drawn to a faint shadow on the gallery wall. A silhouette appears, then it is gone. Where did this shadow come from? Is it an illusion? The answer is that the image on the wall is a faint...
Twenty-one years ago, Katherine Sherwood suffered a brain hemorrhage that left her without the use of her right hand. As described in a 2012 article she wrote for the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, when she eventually returned to her studio, her practice...
Named after Pablo Neruda’s epic poem on the history of the Americas, Rodrigo Valenzuela’s own “General Song” harmonizes with its Lantinx perspective; his two series of photographs, “Barricades” and “Masks,” confront social issues like immigration and revolt while...
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...
The rough-hewn almost ungainly presence of the ceramic vessels that sit directly on the floor in the small space echoes the distinctly DIY atmosphere surrounding them. Festooned with motifs that draw on images ranging from decorative to topical and from historical to...
Greg Lindquist takes his brush to the largest coal electric plants in the United States with his “Ashes to Ashes” series of paintings. They are not, it appears, generating much in the way of energy. The structures look toxic and empty, their surroundings overrun by...
There’s a sense of irony in going to an arts space in a currently-gentrifying area of Philadelphia to watch a video populated largely by shots of neglected city streets. As Francis Fukuyama’s narration discusses globalization, economics, and citizenship, David Hartt’s...
At Alias Books East, in Atwater Village, hangs an unfinished piece of sky. The artist and musician Matt Fishbeck made it by scrabbling a piece of denim-colored stick of oil pastel onto a board. The painting hovers on Alias Books East’s west-facing “art wall” next to...
Lightning, volcanoes, geysers and ice floes possess hellish glory whose terror is facilely reduced to quaintness. Depicting these comely but deadly natural forces, Kelly Berg's artworks illustrate humans' relationship to the earth's crust as a labyrinthine blend of...
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...
As 356 Mission prepares to shutter, two unorthodox shows whet regulars' regret for the singular gallery's imminent finis. Closing April 22, Charlemagne Palestine's plush extravaganza is apposite to new artist Alake Shilling's outlandish show that will remain through...
Alison Saar’s “Topsy Turvy,” her new exhibition at LA Louver, looks to the sixties for strength: the 1860s. Painted on linen and canvas, carved in wood, and shaped from tin, Topsy the slave girl from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Civil War era novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin looks...
"Lorser Feitelson: Figure to Form" at Louis Stern Fine Arts is a small but insightful survey of the noted painter's transition from Post-Surrealism to Hard-Edge Abstraction. Including nine paintings Feitelson (1888-1978) completed between 1945 and 1962, this show...
Matthew Sweesy’s “Nocturnes” and Jesse Edwards’ “Hot Town,” currently at Diane Rosenstein Gallery, are exercises in nostalgia. The two artists, while working in different mediums and styles, have a strikingly optimistic quality. Whether it’s the pop culture references...
Ben Sanders envisions paintings and completes drawings while sitting in church. It sounds as though the pictures yielded by this arrangement would be moralistic, maudlin or mocking; but instead, he transfigures personal and religious narratives into open-ended...
Kerry Tribe’s film Standardized Patient, which was commissioned by SFMoMA in 2017 and is currently at 1301PE, is a filmic expression of thoughtful storytelling centered on a controlled social environment that is often unexplored within the wooly conceptual arts—the...
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