The title of the painting I had been looking at, “Adam and Eve and the Goats” (2016), surprised me. I had thought it was retelling of a classical myth, a subject that Kyle Staver has explored with verve and humor before.
Kent Fine Art
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Figurative Painting That’s Emphatically Human
New York City galleries are raining down a smattering of group shows that showcase figurative painting.
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Master of the Lost, Neglected, and Overlooked
A number of innovative artists of the first half of the 20th century discovered and worked with collage and the related practice of assemblage.
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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.
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Exploring an Expanded Field at the Outsider Art Fair
Nowhere can you feel the silliness (and yet cloying realness) of the term “outsider art” more distinctly than at the Outsider Art Fair, which, by its very nature, is an insiders’ affair.
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Spinning Tales: The Many Pages of Pablo Helguera
On paper, the Mexican artist Pablo Helguera may fit the mold of a neoconceptualist with a social agenda, but the more I see of his work, the more he resembles some kind of latter-day mystic, conjuring up improbable connections and unsettling dislocations.
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Bringing a Spanish-Language Used Bookstore to New York
Of New York’s 8 million people, some 1.9 million speak Spanish at home. That’s almost a quarter of the inhabitants (all figures based on the 2008 census). And trends here reflect a larger one: the US is now home to the second-largest Spanish-speaking population in the world, after Mexico.
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From Lynch to the Lynchian and the Dreams in Between
Hypnotherapy, a group show at Kent Fine Art, gives David Lynch fans a chance to revisit the iconic filmmaker’s alarming artwork a year after his solo turn at Jack Tilton. But that’s only one, conspicuous though it is, of its strengths. What really matters is the opportunity to experience a museum-quality exhibition that approaches the pitfalls of latter-day surrealism with as much intelligence and refinement as this one does.
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Visionary Art Unstuck in Time to Diagram the Metaphysics of the Universe
Most artists wouldn’t take on the staggering task of illustrating the end of the universe for their first major work, but then, most artists aren’t as driven in capturing the cosmic as Paul Laffoley. It was back in 1965 when he embarked on his artistic journey of diagramming the mystical and transcendental, starting with “The Kali-Yuga: The End of the Universe at 424826 A.D.,” a painting involving Hindu cosmology and symbolism of the end of the cycle of time. Earlier in the decade he’d studied classics, philosophy, and art history at Brown University and then architecture at Harvard (he was later involved with Minoru Yamasaki’s designs for the World Trade Center), and he worked for a time in the studio of the dimensionally experimental artist and architect Frederick Kiesler. But it was in Boston that the Massachusetts-born Laffoley would find his focus, creating intensely mapped paintings of sacred, spiritual, and scientific processes.
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Crime, Culture and Black Leather Shoes: A Talk with Dennis Adams
“FUCK Sherrie Levine!” thunders Andre Malraux, quaking with rage, “I was fucking stealing statues in Cambodia!”
Not, however, the real Andre Malraux— the writer, adventurer, and assembler of imaginary museums who became France’s first Minister of Cultural Affairs under Charles de Gaulle (and who, having shed his mortal coil in 1976, would never have heard of Sherrie Levine) — but Andre Malraux as incarnated by the artist Dennis Adams in his 42-minute video tour de force, Malraux’s Shoes.
