Recently I went to Pascal Dombis’s Parisian studio to look into the large public artwork that he will be installing at end of this year at the National School of Architecture in Strasbourg. While there, I formulated some general reflections on his work. For awhile now, Dombis has been creating perverse computer-assisted paintings that seem to try to overthrow, or at least displace, modern...
Pierced by the oblique rays of a setting sun pouring in from the yellowing skylights, the bowels of the abandoned Domino’s sugar refinery in Brooklyn appear like the nave of a rusted cathedral. For two months this spring that majestic industrial ruin was the setting for Kara Walker’s impressively site-specific installation, ironically titled "A Subtlety" a meditation on desire, exploitation,...
Martin Mull has certainly earned his place in the canon of exceptional narrative painters, those for whom painting is a delicate and complicated process by which the artist quantifies his/her relationship to the world around them. Mull’s assessments are usually dark, even sinister at times, and this darkness derives from a seemingly inherent flaw in our humanity, as if the figures in Mull’s...
A small crowd gathers around the entrance to Fouladi Projects gallery at Market and Guerrero in San Francisco. A doorman with a long list in his hand gives me the uneasy fear that I won’t be allowed into the opening, on account of the über-hip celebrity inside. But I tell him I’m with the press, and he shrugs and steps aside nonchalantly. When I walk inside, every eye turns to register my...
Find it in Everything is a slight hardcover book, newly published by Little Brown and Company, featuring Facebook-style photographs by Drew Barrymore. You can find it on Amazon or even at the MOCA bookstore in LA. According to the back cover, Barrymore is now “a photographer.” A biography mentions that her work has been exhibited at the International Center of Photography in New York (a claim...
In contrast to city symphonies’ majestic depiction of high-rises and new machinery, Yu Ji displays discarded objects and debris. Instead of emphasizing order and repetition, the artist embraces liquidity and discord.
YU JI Chisenhale Gallery OUTSIDE LA: London, UK By Eran Sabaner Kalaora At the center of Chisenhale’s main gallery, a black net is suspended, hanging between multiple points on the ceiling. Resembling a post-nuclear hammock, the net carries rubble...
For an artist who has deliberately cultivated a naïve style, Umar Rashid (who also occasionally calls himself Frohawk Two Feathers) appears to have calculated the exhibition’s title, “Per Capita” with almost labyrinthine deliberation—an amalgam of the coyly...
Alexander Harrison’s aptly named exhibition “Midnight Everywhere,” is an exploration of the moods, tones and colors that the night brings. The paintings in the exhibition form a cohesive collection and tell the story of a solitary artist living in an old wooden house...
All good art has at its core an essential moment of transmutation, a point at which the object and the idea which informs it fully coalesce. The essence of the object—whether it’s a painting or a bag sculpture—versus the impulse to create it in the first place are the...