Books
A Chaotic Compendium of the World's Depravity
No matter where French photographer Antoine d'Agata travels, he finds the same festering vein of marginalized depravity.
Reviews
Art
Deconstructing an Artist's Dubious Claim
PHILADELPHIA — When I first saw William Pope.L’s “Claim” (2009), I was intrigued by its emphatic presence and endless detail. Created for the exhibition Ruffneck Constructivists at the Institute of Contemporary Art at the University of Pennsylvania, “Claim” is an enormous wall, about a foot thick, 3
Art
Saving the Environment One Death at a Time
In the United States, funerals often seem to be at war with death's decay. Rather than let our bodies decompose into the soil, we embalm and coat them in makeup, seal them in wood and metal caskets, lower them into waterproof vaults.
Art
Painting the Power of Patriarchy
Sandwiched between two other concurrent exhibitions at the Ryan Lee Gallery, May Stevens: Fight the Power, a one-room exhibit consisting of a mere five pieces, packs a mighty punch. The works, all of which were executed during the Civil Rights era, remain highly arresting, despite some minor signs o
Art
How Do You Solve a Problem Like Marina?
Marina Abramović woke up in the middle of the night having entirely reimagined her then-upcoming exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery.
Art
The Radical Brazilian Artist Who Abandoned Art
As the visitor to the Museum of Modern Art walks across a swarming fifth floor this summer, she will find Lygia Clark: The Abandonment of Art, 1948–1988, the first comprehensive retrospective of the Brazilian artist’s career in America.
Books
Architecture That Doesn't Only Live in Nature But Is Made of It
Inspired by bird nests or vanishing building techniques, architecture based on natural materials is an expanding focus in both sculpture garden and urban landscape.
Books
Modernism Without Irony: The Paintings of Gary Wragg
In 1978, the esteemed British curator Bryan Robertson saw fit to compare the promise of painter Gary Wragg’s emergent career with that of the young Jackson Pollock. It is a comparison lent some weight by the fact that Robertson had written a monograph and organized a major exhibition devoted to Poll
Art
Shape Shifting and Body Politics: Amy Sillman at Bard College
Considering that I had always thought of Amy Sillman as an abstract painter, I was surprised to encounter, after seeing her mid-career retrospective at the Hessel Museum of Bard College, an oeuvre that was entirely about the body, touch, and the awkwardness of human interaction.
Art
Paintings on Paper, Abstract and Effervescent
For his solo show at Pace Gallery in 2010, Thomas Nozkowski made the decision to hang his work in pairs, with an oil painting on canvas board or panel alongside a related work on paper, setting up a contrast between density and light, slow and fast, rumination and riff. This comparison came to mind
Art
A Tumultuous Tale of Boy Meets Girl
Thirty years after its release seduced critics with a nocturnal, jumbled dream of love and light, Leos Carax's debut film, Boy Meets Girl, continues to burn with contradictions, seeming somehow to be younger today than it was yesterday.
Art
The Many Lives of Degenerate Art
It’s not often that a museum gets to directly respond to front-page, bolded-headline media coverage with an exhibition that both nourishes the public’s curiosity about the reported phenomenon and expands the perception of it as well. Deliberately or otherwise, Neue Galerie couldn’t have timed it bet