Art
Into the Abyss: Judith Bernstein’s Dissection of Desire
Sometimes you think you have a handle on an artist’s work, and then a new piece of information comes along that casts it in an entirely different light.
Thomas Micchelli
Art
Deleted Boundaries: Japanese Art at the Met
Discovering Japanese Art: American Collectors and the Met is the unsexy title of a luxuriantly sensual exhibit that speaks with uncanny precision to our post-postmodern moment.
Art
The Triumph of Revisionism: The Whitney’s American Century
With America Is Hard to See, the exhibition inaugurating its luminous new Renzo Piano building, the Whitney has reclaimed its role among the city’s museums as the engine of the new.
Art
The Nature of Things: Daisy Youngblood’s Clay, Sticks and Stones
In 2003, Daisy Youngblood collected her MacArthur prize and decamped to Costa Rica. The sculptures in her current solo at McKee Gallery, Daisy Youngblood: Ten Years 2006-2015, covers the work she’s done since, a ménage of animals and humans, clay and hair, rocks and sticks, where the mythic is extra
Art
A Universe of Drawing, Rolled into a Single Room
Ten years ago, the Morgan Library & Museum decided it was time to bring its collection up to speed on the art of drawing in the 20th and 21st centuries — a daunting task in itself, and even more improbable in the face of a superheated, late-capitalist art market: at the feast of the trophy-eaters, w
Art
Clearing the Slate: MoMA’s Contemporary Reboot
A few months after having been roundly trounced for The Forever Now: Painting in an Atemporal World, its attempt to assess the current state of painting, the Museum of Modern Art opened a reinstallation of its contemporary collection on the same day as its Björk fiasco.
Art
Confounding the Eye: “Breaking Pattern” at Minus Space
Optical painting has been making its presence felt lately, with its 21st-century manifestation swapping the psychedelia and illusionism of its Sixties progenitor, Op Art, for an emphasis on process, systems and formal interrogation.
Art
Taking the Minimal Out of Minimalism: Robin Peck’s Abstract Skulls
There are nine lumps of plaster and Hydrocal — covered in yellowing shellac and polished wax — on display at CANADA on the Lower East Side, their domed tops roughly the size and shape of a human skull (hence the title of the exhibition, Crania).
Art
Forever Young: The Rapturous Art of Edith Schloss
A new exhibition at the Sundaram Tagore Gallery focuses on the life and art of Edith Schloss, the consummate insider/outsider of the New York School.
Art
Quickly Aging Here: The 2015 Triennial
After six years and three installments, is the New Museum’s Triennial entering middle age? An odd question for an exhibition devoted to “early-career artists,” as the museum’s press release describes them.
Art
Dark Matter: Jason Karolak’s Wayward Abstractions
There are times in a painter’s development when progress is slow and incremental, and there are times when everything just pops. In Polyrhythm, Jason Karolak’s luminous solo show of abstract paintings at McKenzie Fine Art, everything just pops.
Art
Shadow and Substance: Patrick Killoran’s Faustian Bargain
Broadly embracing the Minimal, the Conceptual, and the Relational, Patrick Killoran’s solo exhibition at Studio 10 zeroes in on the unlikeliest of subjects — contract law — with an off-kilter braininess that turns each piece into a game of mental catch-up.