“Your mind is not here,” she explains. Standing in the center of the room clad in a floor-length black dress, she is a sharp contrast to the stark white walls. The sweeping space feels anything but, packed as it is with onlookers — some seemingly starstruck, others bewildered — sitting closely together on the gallery floor. “We have to figure out how we can put your minds right here.”
Art
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A Blind-Date Artists’ Talk Casts Doubt on Beauty
Despite the drizzle on a chilly evening, there was a packed (if small) house last night at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP); the reason was a conversation between Brooklyn artist Josiah McElheny and Parisian artist Camille Henrot.
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On Painting, the Melting Pot, and Making Soup: An Interview with Iraqi Artist Ahmed Alsoudani
After living through two wars and emigrating from his native Iraq, Ahmed Alsoudani began his study of art in the U.S. shortly before the events of 9/11. Talk about timing. To say this history has influenced his work would be an understatement — it may well be its defining characteristic.
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The Snake and the Lost War Diary
CHICAGO — Irena Knezevic’s exhibition Night of the World: Flatworks, Multiples and Music Programs embodies a heavy-handedness that could only come from the mind of a Serbian artist living in America post-Yugoslav Wars.
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Remembering Radical, Theoretical Architect Lebbeus Woods
Defiantly non-conformist, anti-starchitecture architect Lebbeus Woods died on Tuesday, October 30. He was 72. Through a lifetime of work, the vast majority of it existing only on paper, Woods challenged the architectural establishment, railing against boring buildings and resisting the temptations of money and fame that turned architects like Zaha Hadid and Rem Koolhaas into celebrities.
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From Action to Inaction: The Tate’s Exploration of Performative Painting
LONDON — It is with the pairing of two 20th-century giants in one room, Jackson Pollock and David Hockney, that the relationship between performance and painting is introduced in A Bigger Splash: Painting after Performance, an exhibition currently on view at the Tate Modern.
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Stretching Out Space, Containing Infinity
Once in a while, there’s an exhibition that succinctly presents so many contradictions, it seems that it may overflow from the gallery space, out into the street. That’s the feeling I had after visiting Soto Unearthed at Bosi Contemporary, and I do not mean this in a negative way.
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Is the World’s Largest Permanent Sculpture a Monument to Our Times?
LONDON — What will the future think of the world when they look back on the marks we have left? Will it be with the same reverence with which we gaze on the Acropolis hill and the Parthenon that sits upon it as a symbol of civilization and democracy or something less forthcoming?
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It’s Hard to Lie in a Drawing
For the last twenty years of his life, Tom Fairs (1925–2007) daily drew in small notebooks what he saw. One of these notebooks is the basis of this exhibition. The notebook was done in June and July of 2004. Of the twenty-four drawings that Fairs made in this notebook, only twelve passed muster. These he framed with a pencil line border. The rest he may have thought needed more attention or weren’t good enough — no one knows for sure. Done entirely in pencil, the twelve drawings measure a little more than 4 x 5 ½ inches, with some vertical and others horizontal in orientation. The subjects are things and places he found in London’s Hampstead Heath and the Georgian buildings, streets and gardens of the surrounding area. Nearly eight hundred acres, Hampstead Heath is a public park dating to the middle ages.
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Can I Get a Witness? Working from Observation
Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects is a long and narrow space, somewhere between a bowling alley and a railroad apartment, on the Lower East Side. It is within this rather confined space that Marshall Price, curator at the uptown National Academy of Art, installed eleven paintings by artists committed to working from observation. Chronologically, the artists span five decades (or generations), with Lois Dodd and Lennart Anderson, born respectively in 1927 and 1928, being the oldest. The youngest include Gideon Bok, Anna Hostvedt, Sangram Majumdar and Cindy Tower, with Bok and Tower born in the 1960s, and Hostevedt and Majumdar born in the 1970s. The other artists are Susanna Coffey, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were born between 1938 and 1949. Together, these artists — a number of whom have been influential teachers — suggest that observational painting is a vigorous, various, and imaginative enterprise that continues to fly under the radar.
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Of Buttons and Babies, Arendt and Eichmann
Maria Bussmann is an artist whose work is rarely seen in this country, and so her compact new show of seven large drawings and twenty-four small ones at NYU’s Deutsches Haus represents a notable opportunity to catch a glimpse of her singular sensibility.
