Art
Lessons in Gigantism: Richard Serra Makes It Work
And then there’s Richard Serra, whose double-gallery blowout at Gagosian is Exhibit A for material-intensity-meets-overwhelming-scale. There’s nothing else like it.
Thomas Micchelli
Art
Never Mind the Bollocks, It’s the Met’s Breuer Now
I realize that I’m coming late to the party with Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible, one of the three debut exhibitions of the Met Breuer, and I have little to add to the conversation about the fundamental problem with the show.
Art
Flesh and Bones: Philip Guston’s “Thingness”
The idea of an abrupt transition between the abstract work and the late figuration has become so ingrained in the narrative of Guston’s career that a view suggesting a more gradual evolution might meet with resistance.
Art
Theater, Science, Music: The Expansive Art of Fausto Melotti
There are numerous points of beguilement throughout the show, beginning in the very first room off the street.
Art
Smeary Smeary Edgar Degas
The first picture that caught me up short was “Factory Smoke” (1877–79), hanging alone on a freestanding wall in the middle of the gallery.
Art
Fearless Symmetries: Judith Braun’s Carbon-Based Art Forms
The unclassifiable drawings of Judith Braun are now on view in two concurrent, very different solo exhibitions.
Art
What Isn't There: Audra Wolowiec’s Sounds, Scents, and Erasures
If the exquisitely mercurial art of Audra Wolowiec can be reduced to a single factor, it would be breath.
Art
Take Me to the River: William Buchina’s Redemption Paintings
Buchina keeps us guessing without falling into obscurantist traps, if for no other reason than the horror he depicts is steadily being eclipsed by the horror of actual events.
Art
Starkly Alien and Intimately Familiar: Maria Bussmann's Drawings of Numbers and Words
I first saw Maria Bussmann’s work in a group exhibition at the James Nicholson Gallery in 2005, where she showed two very different sets of drawings.
Art
A Painter's Progress: Monique Mouton’s Rough Edges
Deceptively casual and casually deceptive, Monique Mouton’s abstract paintings at Bridget Donahue on the Lower East Side are simple statements wrought from a density of decision-making, starting with the often irregular shape she chooses as a surface.
Art
Firestarter: Otto Piene’s Elemental Art
The victors and the vanquished approached the development of avant-garde art in the aftermath of World War II in markedly different ways.
Art
Paint as Language, Language as Paint: Paul D’Agostino’s Chromatic Alphabet
The fluency of concept and form in Paul D’Agostino’s new, bifurcated show at Life on Mars marks a further consolidation of his rigorous attention to language and the infinity of ways it can be parsed, subverted, and remade.