Art
Lucian Freud’s Shadow Self
As a displaced refugee, Freud knew he would always be something of a stranger to himself, but how much would he ever wish to know of himself?
Review
Art
Seeing Ourselves in a Chimpanzee's Art
Seeing works by Congo the chimp takes us from wild aesthetic conjectures to sobering ethical dilemmas around animal agency, art ownership, and basic rights of living creatures.
Art
Meleko Mokgosi's Discursive Art
Mokgosi is as interested in the discourse around the figures in his paintings as in their representation — not that the two could ever exist separately.
Art
Pastel Then, Pastel Now
The Swiss artist Nicolas Party is both the subject and curator of Pastel, an extraordinary exhibition examining the under-appreciated, fugitive medium and its history.
Art
Painting on a Knife’s Edge
With ATOMIC, her new body of work, Patricia Satterlee pitches us into abstract apparitions of heaven and hell before pulling us back to earth.
Art
Portrait of an Invisible Portraitist
I cannot think of another person who has given us such intimate portraits of everyone from Amiri Baraka, Allen Ginsberg, and Jasper Johns to Eartha Kitt, Toni Morrison, and Patti Smith.
Art
Philip Taaffe, Symbolist and Naturalist
Taaffe is able to bring the exterior, visible world as well as the interior imagined world into his paintings. To me, this is what distinguishes him from his contemporaries.
Film
A Hidden Life Is a Passionate, Damning Meditation on Faith and Fascism
Terrence Malick’s latest film makes me feel the way church never did, capturing an essence of the divine through aesthetic sublimity.
Art
Abraham Cruzvillegas's Sculptures Echo the Precariousness of Place
Cruzvillegas’s forms embody the precariousness and hope, if not the danger, of contemporary notions of borders, and the forces at work that make them porous or impenetrable.
Film
The Directors Mixing Fact and Fiction at the Forefront of New Chilean Cinema
In a charged political moment, hybrid documentaries speak to Chilean identity and struggle better than any other form of filmmaking.
Art
An Artist Activates Histories Through Memory
In Zineb Sedira’s work, archival material is not dead and past, but is active, suggesting that there is no such thing as “frozen in time.”
Art
The Illusive, Intimate Nature of Mary Corse's Paintings
One must spend time with Corse’s paintings, which evolve depending on whether the paint applied to the canvas is thick or thin, whether the work is in natural or artificial light, and whether you are close or far away from the painting itself.