Art
History, Music, Freedom: Anri Sala's Art of the Actual
The lingering trauma of repression and the heady, disconcerting repercussions of freedom are tendrils that wend their way throughout Sala’s refined, giddy, somber body of work.
Thomas Micchelli
Art
Encircling Darkness: Fred Valentine's Intimate Portraits
It’s an unsentimental portrait, to say the least.
Art
Discourse, Dazzle, and Snap: Jonathan Lasker’s New Paintings
Jonathan Lasker’s approach to painting hasn't changed materially in decades, and so why would his work, which struck me as an alienating (if not irritating) closed system when I first started looking at it in the 1990s, now feel so open, urgent, and fresh?
Art
Graffiti 2.0: Jeff Schwarz’s Ceramic Abstractions
To be clear, Jeff Schwarz doesn’t use paint on his ceramic paintings. The marks, swipes, smears and sprays across his surprisingly versatile surfaces are created entirely with glaze, slip and clay.
Art
History Repeating Itself: Tragedy, Farce, and Judith Bernstein
With her remarkable new exhibition at Mary Boone — her second at the gallery in eight months — Judith Bernstein resurrects the imagery of her Vietnam-era works in a savage takedown of contemporary American politics and its testosterone-fueled will to power.
Art
Not Necessarily Pleasant: The Paintings of Juanita McNeely
One of the more ferociously beautiful shows you’re likely to see this season is by a 79-year-old painter who was barely out of high school when she was given six months to live.
Art
Broken Utopia: Abstract Painting in Italy
Nobody believes in the simple narrative arc of Modern Art anymore; even so, Painting in Italy 1910s–1950s: Futurism, Abstraction, Concrete Art at Sperone Westwater is an instructive glimpse into the fullness and complexity lying beneath thumbnail histories of the avant-garde.
Art
The Pursuit of Art, 2015
2015 was the Year of the Whitney.
Art
Built-In Fracture: Donald Baechler in the 1980s
In the thoroughly absorbing exhibition Donald Baechler: Early Work 1980 to 1984 at Cheim & Read, there are two works, both from 1982, in which the artist appears to be unlearning how to draw.
Art
Seeking the Real at Art Basel Miami Beach
So where were they? An Inside Art column published in The New York Times a week before the opening of Art Basel Miami Beach dangled the prospect of a more inclusive fair this year, one that would feature “A Focus on Female Artists,” as the headline put it.
Art
Slipping from Grasp: The Photographs of John Brill
Memories, in John Brill’s work, are things — photographs, often grainy and myopic, enshrined in everyday reliquaries: vintage frames, candy dishes, glass bowls, teacups and saucers.
Art
An Early Thanksgiving: The Wagner Gift to the Whitney
Opening in the shadow of the Paris attacks, the exhibition Collected by Thea Westreich Wagner and Ethan Wagner represents — as Adam Weinberg, the director of the Whitney Museum of American Art, said in his remarks at the press preview — “a celebration of what matters in life.”