The Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s mission is to promote important movements within American art while also increasing the visibility of under-recognized artists. Otherworldliness, the gallery’s current exhibition, executes the institution’s objective with cool aplomb.
Reviews
Posted inPerformance
Even the Artist Disappears
Over the weekend, acclaimed and provocative Lebanese artist Rabih Mroué launched his first North American tour, giving the United States premiere of Looking for a Missing Employee as part of Performance Space 122’s annual COIL festival.
Posted inArt
Good Art, Shame About the Written Statement
CHICAGO — There’s often a tug of war going in between what’s in a work of art and what you are told about it. So when I saw the exhibition Turnin’ the Tip at Chicago’s A+D gallery, my first response was to the work that I was looking at it, independent of catalogue essays or wall text: big black and white woodcuts, printed onto canvas banners, some of them as large as 10 feet by 20 feet, produced with a high degree of skill that calls to mind the Mexican tradition of printmaking exemplified by Posada, and the counter-culture graphic style of Robert Crumb.
Posted inArt
A New Year, Same Type of Tired Corporate Critique
Ringing in the New Year, the Winkleman Gallery’s group exhibition Corporations Are People Too might prove that 2011’s artistic obsession with corporate power, the economic crisis, and abandoned office buildings with unintentionally ironic posters will continue into 2012. And I’m not entirely convinced that’s a good thing.
Posted inArt
Art, Science and the Bastardization of Nature
The Skybridge Art & Sound Space inside the Eugene Lang College currently has an installation on view until January 31, 2012. Artifix Mori, by John Ensor Parker and Jason Krugman, both visiting artists in the visual arts program at Eugene Lang, is paradoxically whimsical and ominous in its collision of science, nature, art and technology.
Posted inBooks
An Artobiography That is Personal, But Not Universal
Boulder bookstore owner David Bolduc said of artist and graphic designer Tina Collen’s “artobiography,” titled Storm of the i (2009) and published by Art Review Press, “I’ve been in the book business for thirty years and have seen a lot of books. But I’ve never seen anything like Storm of the i.”
I agree with Bolduc that Storm of the i doesn’t look like other books, but Storm’s uniqueness is also what hinders it most. The book defies traditional design and layout, like a watered down, less haunting version of American author Mark Z. Danielewski’s popular House of Leaves (2000), and it’s a confusing book formally and conceptually. It vacillates throughout all three hundred pages between various different styles—photo album, scrapbook, self-help, personal memoir, maudlin diary, autobiography—and none of them seem to help its author’s intent.
Posted inArt
Confused Clutter at the South African National Gallery
CAPE TOWN — What do Ghanaian photographer James Barnor, local Simonstown painter Peter Clarke, British superstar artist Richard Long and Russian World War II posters have in common? Aside from a show at the South African National Gallery, it seems nothing at all.
Posted inArt
Politics of Space and Belonging and the Right of Return
IRVINE, California – There is a call for Jews to return to Poland — and it’s coming out of Irvine. Well, actually it’s coming from Israeli artist Yael Bartana, whose trilogy … and Europe Will Be Stunned, which occupied the Polish pavilion at the Venice Biennale this year, is currently having its American debut at the University Art Gallery at UC Irvine. The videos present the Jewish Renaissance Movement in Poland (JRMiP), which calls for the return of Jews to Poland to reconstitute the country as it was and make it whole again.
Posted inArt
Why Are We Obsessed With The Way We Look?
Who decides what is and what is not beautiful? To address these questions, Berthold Ecker, Claude Grunitzky and Andreas Stadler, the curators of Beauty Contest at the Austrian Cultural Forum and MUSA, selected 20 internationally acclaimed artist who grapple with society’s obsession and fascination with physical appearance.
Posted inArt
Assessing a Small Show of a Feminist Icon
CHICAGO — In a darkened gallery in the Art Institute of Chicago, a grainy video from decades ago begins. Standing with her face pressed up against a white wall, a woman reaches down and scoops up a handful of red, viscous liquid — presumably blood — from an enamel tray, and in a series of arcing gestures she traces a crude outline of a doorway, or a cave entrance, or maybe just the close demarcation of her own small body, around herself onto the wall.
Posted inArt
Work of Art Recap: Finalmente!
The time has come. Last night was the last episode of Work of Art this season. One of our artistes dreams was made, and two others were crushed, much like bones after a terrible murder. I often follow up my Work of Art viewings with SVU. It puts the devastating losses in perspective.
Posted inArt
Monastic, Psychedelic and Party Time
Mark Warren Jacques’s paintings are equal parts pop and mysticism; they linger between the monastic the psychedelic and party time. A Portland-based artist, his works assert themselves with a clearly defined West Coast swagger. They beam light straight into your head, they knock you down with colorful brilliance only to offer you a leg up and a wholehearted wink.
