The show evokes a prelapsarian aesthetic world from which viewers — following the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden — are barred.
David Zwirner Gallery
The Unknowable Ray Johnson
When Ray Johnson killed himself at the age of 67, the air of mystery surrounding his personality, life, and art only thickened.
The Pleasures of Slow Paintings
These paintings are what the artist Suzan Frecon calls “slow,” meaning that they reveal themselves quietly over time.
Ruth Asawa, a Pioneer of Necessity
Asawa was a woman of Japanese ancestry making art in the years after World War II, which was a double whammy.
Homage to Josef Albers: Writers Pay Tribute to a Pioneer of Abstraction
In Josef Albers: Midnight and Noon, Nicholas Fox Weber, Elaine de Kooning, Colm Tóibín, and more discuss the artist’s seminal Homage to the Square series.
The Contradictory Al Taylor
Al Taylor’s painting practice — an undertaking whose success was tied to its degree of artlessness — seemed to court, if not the “death of painting,” then a refutation of the traditional hierarchy that places painting at the top of the heap.
“The Point at Which All Ideas Fall Apart”: Fred Sandback’s Grand Illusions
Fred Sandback could be considered, and not without reason, as the purest and most unsparingly geometric member of a rigorously formalist generation, a cohort that included Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, Richard Serra, and Sol LeWitt.
Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: a cycling-themed cow statue goes missing, one art dealer sues another over a Jeff Koons sculpture, and a former guard takes the Metropolitan Museum to court.
The Luminous Plastic of an Underappreciated Light and Space Artist
To create translucent sculptures in the colossal proportions he desired, De Wain Valentine needed a new type of plastic.
Judging Galleries by Their Pens: Chelsea Edition
Join me as I wander the streets of Chelsea and bring you the first in an as-yet-only-theoretical series of gallery pen reviews.
Suzan Frecon’s Patience Should Be Rewarded
The turning point for Suzan Frecon happened in 1989, when she saw the exhibition of the Swedish artist and mystic, Hilma af Klint: Secret Pictures at PS1.