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In Rome, a Blockbuster Survey of American Figurative Painting Portrays a Chaotic Country
This piece originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Tamara Kostianovsky Sculpts a Fleshy, Wounded Natural World When Realism was born in the mid 19th century, everyday scenes elbowed their way into the Western canon. Before that, religious and history painting had largely reigned supreme. In the aftermath of the French Revolution, Gustave Courbet and his ilk, galvanized by a successful proletariat struggle, began focusing instead on “real” life, painting the quotidian experiences of workers and peasants with a kind of gritty naturalism. In “Day for...
In the 1960s, Fred Eversley Left His NASA Job to Become an Artist. Now, He’s Realizing Ideas 50 years in the Making
FRED EVERSLEY HAS dedicated his life to making artworks based on the parabola, a shape so ubiquitous that its magic is taken for granted. The ideal physical contour for both concentrating and reflecting many forms of energy—light, sound, radio waves—a parabola is a U-shaped, mirror-symmetrical plane curve. Your eye is a parabola that focuses light, funneling it to your brain. On car headlights, a parabolic surface reflects light back out toward the road. Parabola-shaped TV satellites funnel digital signals to a central point—and eventually, to a television set. Parabolic legs help the Eiffel Tower stand up. Joan Snyder's Painterly Abstractions Are...
Tamara Kostianovsky Sculpts a Fleshy, Wounded Natural World
There is an affinity between trees and bodies held in the language of limbs. This affinity is what makes the soft folds of pastel-colored fabric in Tamara Kostianovsky’s sculptures—life-sized trunks splayed across the gallery floor, innards exposed—so quietly disturbing. The title of her exhibition at Paris’s Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, “Nature Made Flesh,” underscores this parallel of extremities. Citing the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of the “flesh of the world,” which posits an elemental matrix bodily and worldly matter, Kostianovsky probes a corporeal way of being in the world, one she witnessed firsthand as a...
Joan Snyder’s Painterly Abstractions Are Neither Coy Nor Evasive
On my way to take a last long look at “ComeClose,” Joan Snyder’s exhibition this past winter at Canada gallery in New York, I happened to stop in at a nearby gallery where I saw a show by a young painter whose work beguiled but left me frustrated with its too-coy interplay between abstract and figurative elements. At Snyder’s show, the feeling led me to reflect on something that had not previously occurred to me in the nearly 40 years I’ve spent looking at her work and occasionally discussing it with her, but which suddenly emerged as crucial: In Snyder’s...
“Space Makers” Charts the Influence of Native Art on American Abstraction
Visually dense and conceptually expansive, “Space Makers: Indigenous Expression and a New American Art” surveys multiple movements and styles often absent from museums of American art. The exhibition foregrounds flat, organic abstraction from midcentury New York known as Indian Space Painting amid a mix of graphic works by Native American artists from the 1960s to the present, as well as 19th-century Indigenous objects from multiple regions around the country. Interpretive text emphasizes “shared visual forms” among nearly three dozen works across two galleries, while motifs echo through distinct media and time periods. Palestinian Painter Samia Halaby's Retrospective Triumphs in Michigan...
Isaac Julien Reinvents the Biopic Genre in Installations at MoMA and the Whitney
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.George Platt Lynes's Elegant Photographs Feature Century-Old Throuples and Ring Lights Shortly after the opening title card appears in Isaac Julien’s 45-minute film Looking for Langston (1989), a fuzzy voice can be heard. Set against a black screen, the voice, appropriated from a 1967 radio broadcast, promises a memoriam program for the deceased Harlem Renaissance poet Langston Hughes, who will be remembered here via “a blending of memory, tributes, and his own words.” This is a clever fib...
Hugh Hayden Gives Chelsea What It Needs Most: A Public Restroom
For his show “Hughmans,” New York sculptor Hugh Hayden has converted Lisson Gallery’s snazzy, pristine Chelsea space into a public restroom. Visitors circumambulate the gallery, opening gray stall doors and finding sculptures inside. The playful intervention offers rare moments of privacy in a bustling city—and thus encourages mischief in turn. As I spoke to the artist outside one of the stalls, we noticed that the door had been locked, and peeped two pairs of feet poking out underneath. Surely the duo could hear us discuss our desire to get inside, but did not unlock the door for another ten minutes...
Jim Carrey’s Collection Goes to Auction, Claudine Colin Bought by Finn Partners, France’s Legislative Elections Raise Concern, and More: Morning Links for July 10, 2024
To receive Morning Links in your inbox every weekday, sign up for our Breakfast with ARTnews newsletter.Israel Approves Bill to Expand Presence of Antiquities Authority in West Bank WAIT AND SEE. The cultural sector in France was relieved, when the final results of the parliamentary election were announced on Sunday, reports The Art Newspaper. The left-wing New Popular Front won 182 seats, the highest number, but failed to win an overall majority, leaving France to face a hung parliament. The threat lies in Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally, which came third after President Emmanuel Macron‘s centrist coalition. Before the election, one thousand doctors, scholars and researchers urged...
Palestinian Painter Samia Halaby’s Retrospective Triumphs in Michigan After Cancellation in Indiana
Some 60 years ago, during her undergraduate studies at Michigan State University (MSU), Samia Halaby’s interest in abstract painting began to take shape. Now, at 87, the influential Palestinian painter is realizing her first United States retrospective: “Samia Halaby: Eye Witness,” at MSU’s Broad Art Museum. In a homecoming of sorts, the show introduces the artist at her alma mater via some of those earliest undergrad forays into abstraction. Two examples are Lilac Bushes (1960) and House (1959): both boast thick layers of warm colors that contrast with olive greens and cool blues.Israel Approves Bill to Expand Presence of ...
Christopher Wool Tries Blending Bad-Boy Energy with Blue Chip Clout
In 1997, Christopher Wool published Incident on 9th Street, a collection of photographs he took of his studio when filing an insurance claim for fire damage. His matter-of-fact snapshots record blown-out windows, a collapsed ceiling, and ripped up floors—documents and materials are scattered everywhere. Yet in one picture, two of Wool’s paintings lean against a wall, remarkably intact among the wreckage.Brookfield Properties Is Betting Art Will Draw Workers Back to the Office “See Stop Run,” an exhibition in a century-old office tower in New York’s Financial District, primarily surveys Wool’s last decade of work, though his practice dates to the 1980s....
George Platt Lynes’s Elegant Photographs Feature Century-Old Throuples and Ring Lights
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Fernando Palma Rodríguez's Robots Cultivate Life While Technology Destroys It It’s tempting to say that photographer George Platt Lynes was ahead of his time. Between the 1930s and his untimely death at age 48, he produced a body of work—elegant fashion photography, sleek images of nude men—that feel fresh today. But Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, a recently released documentary by Sam Shahid, argues that, in fact, Lynes was very...
“Mary Cassatt at Work” Honors the Labor of Attention and Love
After visiting the Mary Cassatt exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, I know what it looks like to think. You see her figures thinking, then they are blank-faced, then they think beyond the blank.'Berthe Morisot in Nice' Delves into the Impressionist Painter's Working Methods The show introduces Cassatt to a new generation. The curators, Jennifer A. Thompson and Laurel Garber, wanted to get closer to who Cassatt was, to how she wanted to be remembered, and to the legacy of her seemingly serene paintings. They do so by focusing on process. Cassatt, they tell us, was obsessed with work. She...
Video: Arlene Shechet Brings Color and Humor to Her Monumental Sculptures
Art in America’s Summer 2024 “Icons” issue features a profile of Arlene Shechet, a sculptor known for her modestly scaled mixed-media works. As Glenn Adamson writes in his story, Shechet’s breathtaking exhibition of monumental sculptures now on view at Storm King Art Center in Upstate New York (through November 10) is “only the latest, if possibly the greatest, evidence of Shechet’s insatiable curiosity.” The show, cheekily titled “Girl Group,” features heavy-metal sculptures made of aluminum and steel redefined by bold colors like emerald green, chartreuse, and orange. Video: Pakistani American Artist Shahzia Sikander On Reimagining Painting Traditions From Around the...
Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s Robots Cultivate Life While Technology Destroys It
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Rachel Cusk's New Novel Dissects Motherhood and Making Art It had been a while since I last felt attacked in an exhibition, but the serpent made a move and the situation could’ve ended up a lot messier than it did. It helped that the serpent was animatronic and super stylized—but it took a moment to remember this while my body recoiled. The exhibition was Fernando Palma Rodríguez’s at Canal Projects in New York, which...
Remembering the Monumental Sculptor Richard Serra
During an evening of performances at The Kitchen in Lower Manhattan in 1974, Richard Serra had a friend read a story about his own childhood in San Francisco. When he was about five years old, his family moved from the city to the beach, where sand dunes marked his horizon. Serra was a mischievous child, so his father assigned him a daily task: to move a certain sand dune from one part of the terrain to another by the time he returned from work. Rather than resenting the task, Serra found a certain rhythm in performing the action—in scooping the...
Rachel Cusk’s New Novel Dissects Motherhood and Making Art
Four chapters, four artists, and four mothers make up Rachel Cusk’s latest novel, Parade. Sometimes, the artist and the mother are the same person. Other times (maybe always), the mother is the oblique subject of the artist’s work, if only as some unseen force against which the artist is reacting. Some mothers are better at their jobs than others—and the same goes for the artists too.The challenges of the artist-mother dynamics in the book are never resolved. That might be because 1) if Freud is to be believed, maternal conflicts are lifelong and basically insoluble, and 2), each of the...
Video: Pakistani American Artist Shahzia Sikander On Reimagining Painting Traditions From Around the World
Shahzia Sikander—who was profiled for the Summer 2024 “Icons” issue of Art in America—is a Pakistani American artist known for reimagining different painting traditions from around the world, as well as work in other mediums including sculpture, animation, installation, and video. As Eleanor Heartney writes in her profile, Sikander “juxtaposes imagery sourced from Indian court painting, Western Renaissance and Mannerist art, African tribal figures, Hindu and Persian legends, biblical narratives, and Western fairy tales. She melds figures drawn from the religious traditions of Buddhism, Jainism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Her works deal with a multiplicity of issues, from female power...
Shahzia Sikander’s Luminous Art Explores East and West, Past and Present, Order and Chaos
On a surprisingly springlike day in late February, Shahzia Sikander was hard at work at Pace Paper Studio in the Gowanus neighborhood of Brooklyn. Having just sent off the artworks for her upcoming retrospective in Venice, she was now immersed in a new series of works on paper. She was also fielding calls about a controversy over her work that had just erupted in Texas. The dispute involved an 18-foot-high bronze sculpture recently installed in a plaza at the University of Houston. Titled Witness, the sculpture arrived there following a five-month dramafree display in Madison Square Park in New York...
Navajo Artist Melissa Cody Reclaims a Sacred Symbol That the Nazis Weaponized
A version of this essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.Why Carla Accardi Abandoned Abstraction for Activism--and Then Came Back In Melissa Cody’s 2014 weaving Good Luck, a figure known as Rainbow Man is represented as an electrical cord, his lower half culminating in a two-pronged plug. His tubular body encircles the phrase GOOD LUCK, and beneath those words, there’s a somewhat unexpected motif, formed from four right angles that meet at a central point. Navajo viewers will understand the symbol as a whirling log, which connotes Good...
Claire Bishop’s New Book Argues Technology Changed Attention Spans—and Shows How Artists Have Adapted
IT’S AN EPIDEMIC. Umpteen open browser tabs, endless push notifications, and a relentless news cycle are inducing widespread symptoms of ADHD in even the most chemically balanced of brains. It’s changing everything, including the ways we look at art.Legacy Russell's 'Black Meme' Critiques Representations of Black Culture--But Doesn't Chart a Way Forward This is the subject of a new book by art historian Claire Bishop, titled Disordered Attention: How We Look at Art and Performance Today. Bishop posits that our phones have become a kind of “prosthesis for viewing” art, and her book is about how artists are responding to this...
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