James Welling’s “Flowers” (2004–11) suggest backlit tree branches in bloom against a blank sky. A pure white light appears to pass through these elegant arrangements of shadowy stem, leaf and petal shapes, and in the process is refracted, as if by a prism, into otherworldly hues. These are photograms, camera-less images made by placing objects onto photosensitized material then exposing to...
Micol Hebron is an interdisciplinary artist based in Los Angeles. Through photographic works, videos, installations, performance and writing, she has become known for critically engaging the tropes of art history and modernism, with a particular eye toward resurfacing and re-examining feminist activism. Recently, she launched a collaborative poster project called “(en)Gendered (in)Equity,” in...
Painted on a small particle board, screwed to a brick wall, above and behind which Berlin’s U-Bahn (here elevated) rumbles to and from its terminus, a figure of indeterminate sex holds a power drill to its head, the bit twirling out the opposite temple in a splash of red pigment. The agape mouth conveys a scream of pain—and perhaps a dollop of pleasure. In the upper left, the words, “You know...
Summer of 1965. The artist’s mother, Resia (also an artist), stands between her two daughters wearing a sleeveless shift with a bold daisy pattern. The horizon line of the Atlantic connects the heads of the three women, who pose, smiling and relaxed, in front of a long vista of open sea. That horizon, those daisies are among the leitmotifs in Mira Schor’s show of new paintings and drawings at...
There’s a scene early on in the film The Night of the Iguana (1964) where Richard Burton, playing a jaded ex-priest-turned-tour-guide in Mexico, asks the bus driver to stop on a bridge. The passengers—a group of American matrons—are puzzled. “What are we stopping for?” one asks. “A moment of beauty…” says Burton, gazing wistfully at the locals on the riverbanks below—women cheerfully washing...
Upon entering Stephen Neidich’s solo show, “five more minutes please,” everything is stock still, until the clattering begins. It immediately becomes clear that one’s movements cause the Venetian blinds—hanging from the ceiling or against the gallery walls—to raise or...
Painter Amy Sherald became a household name in 2018 when her portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama was unveiled at the National Gallery of Art. Sherald’s unique approach to studio portraiture and practice of universally rendering Black skin in grisaille (an...
There almost certainly are figures both human and animal, as well as a plenitude of botanical, arboreal, avian and possibly extraterrestrial apparitions inhabiting and defining the landscape-like spaces of Lucy Bull’s paintings. But closer contemplation makes it...
With a large grouping of esteemed photographers—Jo Ann Callis, Tania Franco Klein, Kennedi Carter, Graciela Iturbide, Katsumi Watanabe and others— it’s the curator, not the artists, who moderates the conversation. In a world defined by schisms and polarities, and a...
Sula Bermúdez-Silverman’s solo exhibition “Sighs and Leers and Crocodile Tears,” at first seems to be a curious series of clichés, but a story begins to unfold—through Silverman’s attention to detail—about the history of power, erasure, hierarchy and otherness that...