Art
First there was a solo show by a painter’s painter, and then a slice of sour cherry pie from a food-based conceptual artist. That they were encountered on the same day was by accident and not by design, which is the way art happens much of the time.
Art
Gleaming in the ghost-light of fluorescent tubes, the vitrine-encased vacuum cleaners that open the Whitney Museum’s Jeff Koons retrospective are nothing short of spectacular. The rest of the work, however, with few exceptions, reveals itself to be as thin, puerile and derivative as the artist’s har
Art
“Support” and “surface” mean the same thing in French as they do in English, an accident of language that mirrors the immediacy of Supports/Surfaces, a self-titled exhibition of paintings, sculptures and category-skipping hybrids from a little-known art movement based in the south of France.
Art
There are currently two exhibitions of Joan Mitchell’s paintings and drawings on the same Chelsea street. Taken together, they offer an extended examination of a painter’s process as her sensibilities shift from a dominant mode expression to something altogether different.
Art
John Avelluto’s artworks — we’ll call them paintings for the sake of convenience — take trompe l’oeil places it was never meant to go. By turns exercises in mind-boggling craft and mind-twisting formalism, they repeatedly abrade the boundary between the hyperreal and the micro-minimal with their tou
Art
Everything moves in It Ain’t What You Make It's What Makes You Do It, a quirky funhouse of a show currently spinning, tapping, and pounding away at Valentine. And almost everything makes noise — a lot of noise. If you want to finish up the 2013–14 art season with a bang, this is the place to go.
Art
Rachel, Monique, Sophie Calle’s memorial to her mother, is installed in a side chapel of the starkly beautiful neo-Gothic Episcopal Church of the Heavenly Rest on Fifth Avenue and 90th Street. On a marble plaque beside the chapel entrance, the artist has overlaid a brief text noting that her mother
Art
“The intestine is a hole that we can never fill,” Anna Maria Maiolino tells the curator Helena Tatay in a wide-ranging interview published on the Documenta 13 website, “just as we can never fulfill desire.”
Art
Maria Lassnig’s retrospective at MoMA PS1 is the largest survey of her work ever mounted in the United States. It reveals an idiosyncratic artist whose quirks and caprices, especially in her later work, can feel willful, even perverse — up to a point.
Books
To be honest, Relatively Indolent but Relentless, Matt Freedman’s artist’s book recounting his 35-day incarceration on Planet Cancer, got me at the dedication: “For Radiant Jude.”
Art
The great iconoclastic painter Peter Saul, for the first time ever, has turned his hand to curating, gathering together nearly two dozen kindred spirits for a show that revels, as to be expected, in the libidinous and the ravenous, the stunted and the scared, the blinkered and the grotesque — that i
Art
Irresistibly baffling, Laura Sharp Wilson’s paintings ensnare us inside a post-industrial jungle of tangled cables and serpentine vines, blinding yellow days and blacker than black nights. Her crisply articulated forms thrust, loop, spiral, dangle, cluster, zigzag, and coil edge-to-edge with a singu