Books
Where Funhouse Erotics Meet Art History
A new volume of Hilary Harkness’s paintings enfolds us into surreal worlds of gender-bending militaries, feminine revenge, and alternative histories.
Reviews
Art
Xingzi Gu’s Dreamlike Portraits of Youth
The tension between moments of quiet joy and inevitable calamity in Gu's ethereal portraits is riveting.
Art
It’s Time for Chryssa’s Neon Art to Shine
Chryssa, it turns out, did everything that the famous Pop and New Media artists did, simultaneously or, in some instances, first.
Art
Hugh Hayden Should Cut the Crap
The artist’s latest show belongs in the toilet — and that’s exactly where he put it.
Art
A Close Look at Caravaggio’s Last Painting
Just two paintings are in The Last Caravaggio, both in perplexed mourning over their subject matter, and both emerging from dark places.
Art
Healing Japanese Art for the End Times
A show of Japanese art at The Met suggests that things might not work out for us in our own end times, but it’s worth trying.
Art
Unearthing the Land’s Buried Stories at the Venice Biennale
Artists at the Irish, Hãhãwpuá, Portuguese, and Dutch pavilions are exploring notions of land and rematriation — often by bringing soil itself into the gallery space.
Art
Of Monkeys and Men
Michaël Borremans’s paintings seem to display a pitiless, if not forbidding, irony, almost studiedly cruel in their level of dispassion.
Film
The Women and Children of the Second Artsakh War
Two films make US viewers reckon with the extent to which American ignorance — and indifference — to the conflict is a side effect of “winning” the Cold War.
Art
Abigail Dudley’s Paintings of the Observed and Imagined
I can think of no other painter who can so effectively pull the viewer into a space where clarity and puzzlement cannot be separated.
Books
The Revisions That Make Us Human
Revising Reality argues that the world as we know it is our creative output so our memories cannot help but be continually edited.
Art
Bimbola Akinbola’s Postcards From Grief Island
Though the show is a response to a period of intense personal mourning in the artist’s life, it’s also achingly universal.