Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2015 i ARTnews

Few recent shows have generated as much critical agitation as “The Forever Now,” the Museum of Modern Art’s survey of new painting. To Jerry Saltz, it failed “to make a case for the exceptional quality, or truly new character, of contemporary painting.” Roberta Smith called it “well-done but too-safe.” Peter Schjeldahl tempered his praise (“a strong show, and timely”) with the observation that the show’s “own terms make it more expressive of honest discontent than of inspiring invention.” In the Guardian, Jason Farago lamented the “art that feels safe or unambitious,” concluding with a sigh, “If art seems not to have a very bright future, at least that means it’s of our time.” The Baer Faxt dropped the gavel with its annual poll, naming “The Forever Now” the “Worst US…

BILL POWERS: YOU RECENTLY ORGANIZED SOMETHING AT CHAPTER NY? Math Bass: Yes, when I was asked to do this show I saw it as an opportunity to bring together my work with Lauren Davis Fisher’s and Gordon Hall’s. We all have these overlapping interests in the space between prop and sculpture, the performativity of that space, the activity of ambiguity. We all responded to the title of the show, to the spatial and relational parameters of this title, “With & Width.” BP: ARE THE NEW PAINTINGS SIMILAR TO YOUR OTHER PICTOGRAMS? MB: They are and they aren’t. I have continued to work with this vocabulary of symbols, which continues to expand and grow. I usually work in dimensions that are pretty close to square and the dimensions of these pieces…

Dustin Yellin has always been into books. His collection includes one owned by Robert Frost in which the poet scribbled a verse, and he has the first English translation of Nostradamus from the 17th century. All this is to say nothing of his scores of books published by Olympia Press, home to Lolita and Naked Lunch when everyone else turned them away. “When I was younger and a little wilder,” Yellin, 39, said over the phone, “I would meet with my collectors at the Strand—the beloved bookstore on Broadway in Manhattan—before I had had any real success, and say, ‘Listen, take me to the rare-book department, buy me this one, buy me this one and this one and, uh, I’ll give you a painting, OK?’” Yellin is no stranger to…

When director John Waters puts on his artist hat he often reworks images, adding playful, generally crowd-pleasing twists—one might call it Pictures Generation Lite. For his third show at Boesky, he reimaged himself with Botox and a facelift in Beverly Hills John (2012), riffing on Cindy Sherman. He aped Richard Prince’s pulp work and redid the cover of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang as “Clitty Clitty Bang Bang” in Library Science #4 (2014). He also spliced a cruise ship, a crashing plane, a pink flamingo, and other oddities into classic Ansel Adams photos in Cancel Ansel (2014). The works ranged from an edgy greeting card (as in the above) to a solid bit of political propaganda, like Separate But Equal (2014), which offers up separate water fountains labeled “Gay Married” and…

Joe Fyfe’s recent exhibition was almost baroque, verging on “everything,” as promised by its title, “make me one with everything,” the start of a Buddhist joke involving a hot dog. Rooted in the likes of Beuys, arte povera, Rauschenberg, and Richard Tuttle, these works, made from a rich and motley trove of materials—felt, cotton, flags, bricks, tires, a black car bumper, drums, a capsized umbrella, signs, and more, were set on the floor, hung on walls, and suspended from on high. They were the discards of daily life that Fyfe salvaged from Vietnam and other Southeast Asian countries where he likes to wander. His collages here were particularly gratifying, a lyrical balance of painting, bright graphics, photographs, and found items on canvas, cardboard, and paper. Though seemingly effortless, based on…

High-spirited, coquettish, and mischievously provocative just begins to describe Huguette Caland’s paintings and works on paper from 1970 to 1985. In disarmingly playful colors, Caland rendered geometry lubricious and personal as she seesawed between abstraction and figuration, landscape and body, especially in the delightful “Bribes de Corps” (Body Fragments) series from 1973. The swelling forms—nothing could be sexier than one of her shapes meeting another, the line between them electric—breasts, thighs, bellies, buttocks, as well as mountains and valleys, all recall Brancusi’s investigations of reductive figuration, Georgia O’Keeffe’s double-entendre flower paintings—but without the coyness of petals—and Louise Bourgeois’s soft sculptures. On view were also some caftans, part of a project with Pierre Cardin. Miroir (1974) is threaded with a sketch of a nude, breasts, navel, pudenda, and butt cleavage appropriately…

The works in Belgian artist Berlinde De Bruyckere’s mid-career retrospective “Sculptures & Drawings 2000–2014” appeared nightmarish, but the abomination they depict is actually the banal reality that we all do, or will, face. When viewed intimately, they speak to the private dismay felt on seeing skin get thinner, veins more visible, hair more brittle, and bodies increasingly alien. Since the 1990s, using leather, wax, wood, wool, horsehair, and traditional drawing materials, De Bruyckere has been creating artworks that initially evoke tortured creatures from horror films and art history. Here, wax images of distorted bodies are displayed in vitrines, bundles of wax animal bones tied together in red, weathered fabric are piled on wooden plinths, and biomorphic sculptures made of horse skin are suspended from metal scaffolds under the soaring ceilings…

1OO YEARS AGO “London Letter,” by L. G.-S. March 27, 1915 A sensational haul was made by the police a few days ago at an old manor-house in the suburbs, apparently used by a gang of thieves for some time past as a receiving-place for stolen treasures. This house, formerly a convent, and now elegantly decorated and furnished, concealed behind its panelling secret safes in which was stowed an enormous quantity of valuable antiques comprising bronzes, ivories, gold and silver plate and jewelry, a large portion of which has been since identified by its owners. Among the miscellaneous collection, it is pleasant to be able to record, were found the three archaic Chinese bronzes stolen in January last from Mr. C. J. Holmes, Director of the National Portrait Gallery. 5O…

Michael E. Smith’s sculptures look like things you might see tangled in a chain-link fence, or gathering around the edges of a Walmart parking lot: a duffel bag, scraps of foam, a satellite dish, sweatpants. But rather than simply presenting them as found objects, Smith variously blankets them in oats, stiffens them with resin, stacks them together, or otherwise alters them with some personal touch. They evoke the bottomed-out urbanism of Smith’s native Detroit. But in his hands these discarded parts are retrofitted with new life, revealing along the way his own troubled reconciliation with the city. “Without a doubt, without a doubt, without a doubt, Detroit has damaged me,” Smith said. “I’m very much influenced by that place, but on a level that I’m still barely coming to terms…

“The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World” is MoMA’s first survey of recent painting in over 30 years. In the museum’s crowded sixth-floor galleries, curator Laura Hoptman has corralled 17 artists who have come to notice in the last decade or so, and collectively they give off a synaptic charge. There are a fair number of clunkers, but the majority of the painters here display an honestly arrived-at complexity, expressed through a rigorous series of choices made at what feels like a granularly visual level. Their work rewards hard looking. The good artists in the show are very good indeed. Charline von Heyl, Josh Smith, Richard Aldrich, Amy Sillman, Mark Grotjahn, Nicole Eisenman, Rashid Johnson, Joe Bradley, and Mary Weatherford have all developed tenacious and highly individual styles.…

On a frigid afternoon in January, the artist Laurie Simmons was in her airy second-floor studio in rural Cornwall, Connecticut, sipping coffee and talking about her recent work. For the past few years, she said, she’s been asking people, “What’s your favorite movie about an artist?” She put the question to me. Maybe Ed Harris’s Pollock (2000), I said. And hers? “I’m looking for one,” she said. “I think that’s why I want to make one.” Shooting on her first feature film was set to begin in a few months. “It’s a narrative feature called My Art,” Simmons said. “It’s the story of a woman artist of a certain age who, um . . . who teaches. She’s had some shows, and she has friends, and she has a really…

Ursula von Rydingsvard’s powerful modular constructions resemble accretions produced by nature: meandering patterns in bark, or mountain ranges carved by glaciers. “Permeated Shield,” an exhibition of 14 works from 2012 to 2014, included several of the artist’s familiar assertive cedar-and-graphite constructions and four mixed-media pieces that revealed a more delicate dimension of von Rydingsvard’s persona. While not overtly feminist, these works advance the conversation begun by women sculptors of the late 20th century, focused on sustenance, biology, vulnerability, and critique of the modernist credo. The huge floor pieces seemed ancient, built in a gravity-defying crescendo from the ground up, widest at the top. Suspended spoon and ladle wall pieces looked ready to feed some oversize maw. The hollow, punctured top of Bent Lace (2014), a large form in bronze, flops…

The gallery spaces here offer an austere but elegant setting for the first large-scale show since 1963 devoted to Medardo Rosso (1858–1928). Hugely admired by the Futurists, a friend and rival of Rodin, Rosso created a kind of melting, haunted figuration—in plaster, wax, and bronze—perfectly in keeping with the fractured approaches of his day. His range was small, and he liked to repeat subjects. CIMA included most of his better-known sculptures, like Ecce Puer (1906), Madame Noblet (1897), and Bookmaker (1894). All have the power of veiled faces or forms just emerging from the primordial murk. But the real bonanza in this show can be found in the dozens of drawings and photographs on view, with most of the photos relating directly to the sculptures (and intended as works in…

With a punning title evoking William Faulkner’s 1930 novel, Andra Ursuta’s solo show “As I Lay Drying” highlights her gothic wit. One of the ICA’s two inaugural exhibitions, this survey of the Romanian-born, New York–based artist’s work is installed in Miami’s landmark 1921 Moore Building, this brand-new museum’s temporary home. Like Faulkner’s story, the exhibition incorporates multiple points of view. Sculptural objects have been set on wood and Sheetrock platforms, which are in turn balanced on beams crisscrossing the building’s stripped-out, four-story atrium. As viewers climb from level to level, they see the artworks from different vantages. This violation of the institution’s architecture parallels Ursuta’s treatment of male and female figures, which are often presented as abused or desecrated. A 2012 group of 42 gaily painted urethane casts of the…

Viewers familiar with the work of Niki de Saint Phalle (1930–2002) know her sprightly, colorful Nana figures with their exaggerated bosoms and hips, but this impressive retrospective also revealed the darker side of de Saint Phalle’s vision. Throughout her career, the self-taught French American, often described as the first feminist artist, veered between the comic and the socially critical. Body politics, sexual exploitation in general and child abuse in particular, is a recurrent subject in her multifaceted work—as in her hypnotic, painfully autobiographical film Daddy (1973), which describes her own rape at the age of eleven. There was scarcely a medium de Saint Phalle did not explore in what seemed a passionate need for self-expression— she was at once a painter, assemblagist, sculptor, performer, and filmmaker. The first major show…

With the publication in 2013 of her celebrated second novel, The Flamethrowers, Rachel Kushner earned the rare distinction of be-coming a crossover novelist embraced by the art world. It helped that The Flamethrowers focused on a group of struggling artists in downtown Manhattan in the 1970s, back when one could afford to be such a thing, before the rows and rows of commercial white cubes invaded the city. Among the novel’s artist cameos are Walter De Maria and an inebriated John Chamberlain. One character shares a name with John Dogg, the alter ego of Richard Prince. The fictional art dealer Helen Hellen-berger, a ruthless businesswoman, gradually capitalizing on the more talented people around her, is the book’s ur-gallerist and has quite a lot in common with Mary Boone, the real-life…

Museums are fond of publishing tomes that celebrate their illustrious histories. These days, galleries are getting in on the game. But New York dealer Andrea Rosen’s decision to publish, this month, a boxed set of 26 books celebrating her gallery’s 25th anniversary came as something of a surprise. “I’m not normally a person who looks back-ward,” Rosen told ARTnews in January. “As Yoko Ono said to me recently, ‘If you’re looking backward or for-ward, you’re not doing the work you need to be doing now.’” Twenty-five of the books are devoted to group shows—a wide array, ranging from historical shows to assemblies of contemporary artists. The final volume is an index that includes solo exhibitions with artists whose careers she helped launch, like Felix Gonzalez-Torres (who inaugurated her gallery, then…

One of the most surreal assemblages of cultural signifiers I’ve ever encountered was in Los Angeles in the summer of 2011, when the rapper Riff Raff—soon to shoot to stardom after inspiring James Franco’s character in the 2013 Harmony Korine movie, Spring Breakers —performed for a small crowd inside of a new-age multimedia installation by the artist Matt Barton. Riff Raff cycled through his soon-to-be-recognizable tropes, flashing a diamond Ghostbusters chain, and hurling rice into an audience that included the electronic producer James Ferraro and the rapper Lil B, composer of such songs as “Pretty Bitch” and “I’m God.” This was at Dem Passwords gallery, where such a happening turned out to be just a typical evening. The business was founded in 2010 by Sebastian Demian and Ethan Higbee in…

Millions of soccer fans flooded Brazil in 2014 for the World Cup, but for the art world, the big story is that international collectors and artists are making their presence felt in this country’s once-isolated contemporary-art scene. With the success of the São Paulo Biennial and ArtRio fair in September, soon to be bolstered by the more profitable SP-Arte fair opening in São Paulo this month, collectors from around the globe are finding reasons to go to Brazil. A recent study conducted by Latitudes, an organization for the promotion of Brazilian galleries abroad, and ArtTactic, a market-research firm, found that 74 percent of international collectors surveyed either own or say they intend to buy the work of a Brazilian artist. American collectors needn’t have traveled far to encounter Brazilian art…

Michelle Stuart’s exhibition “Silent Movies” focused on photography—the artist’s own, and vintage images by others. These works, conjuring a world before global travel was routine, were more dreamscape than documentation, although intimations of colonialism were inherent. Installed as a series of grids, the photos suggested film stills unspooling disjunctive but associative images. The prints, in understated black-and-white, sepias, and pale tones, as in Field Notes (2013), have a haunted air, steeped in objective scenes and personal memory. One work, Ghost/Memory/History (For Sebald), 2013, is dedicated to the writer W. G. Sebald who often used images to flesh out his text. Indeed, Stuart’s project seems closely allied to Sebald’s blend of autobiography, historical investigation, fiction, and travelogue. The largest work present, Hear the Mermaids Sing (2013), seemed even larger with its…

Louise Bourgeois (1911–2010) found the perfect way to liberate sculpture from floors and walls: suspend it. She explored the idea for some 60 years, judging by the chronological span of this powerful show of three drawings and 21 objects. Bourgeois may have been haunted by the Hanged Man from the Tarot deck, a symbolically charged figure residing between worlds, neither of earth nor heaven—precisely the zone where art should be experienced, simultaneously in and out of context. Femme (1993), a small bronze, removed us to a different age, since it so clearly resembles the Paleolithic statue known as the Venus of Willendorf. This piece links Bourgeois to that remote culture’s glorification of the fertile female body while simultaneously evoking the liberated sexuality of 20th-century women. The tactile, fleshlike texture of…

In 1988, Richard Diebenkorn moved from Los Angeles, locus and inspiration for his famed “Ocean Park” series, to the small village of Healdsburg on the Russian River, 70 miles north of San Francisco. In the five years before his death, in 1993, the artist was clearly looking for new directions, and this choice selection of works on paper (no major paintings emerged from his last five years) hinted at where the mind and eye were taking him. Ghosts of the “Ocean Park” canvases remained in several of the untitled works in this show, subtitled “The Healdsburg Years 1988–1993.” It was as if small sections of those massive paintings called for elaboration and magnification. But oddly biomorphic shapes appeared, too—a curvy wedge encasing striped triangles, blotchy vegetal forms—and in three gouaches…

For Carol Rama, as for too many other immensely important women artists—Claude Cahun and Louise Bourgeois among them—mainstream art-world acknowledgement arrived very late. Rama, now 96, was over 80 years old when the Venice Biennale awarded her the Golden Lion in 2003, although prior to that artists such as Kiki Smith, Cindy Sherman, and Rosemarie Trockel had already acknowledged her influence. Now “The Passion According to Carol Rama,” an ambitious and thoroughly researched traveling retrospective, introduces her work to a wider audience. The show includes an impressive array of Rama’s water-colors and drawings from the 1930s and ’40s, censored by the Italian fascist regime of the time. Powerful representations of sexuality, works such as Heretic (1944), in which a headless male torso sodomizes some kind of strange furry animal, or…

Of all the exhibitions about conflict timed to coincide with the 100th anniversary of the First World War, few were as compelling or as dark as this one. The show examined the effect of modern warfare on the human mind and body through nearly 200 artworks—mostly paintings, but also some telling films—from 1914 to the present. Powerfully evoking the modern war machine was the column of robot-like soldiers in C. R. W. Nevinson’s Futurist painting Returning to the Trenches (1916), while William Orpen’s The Schwaben Redoubt (1917) depicts the ruined landscape of the Western Front so convincingly one can almost smell the gas and rotting corpses. But it is the bodies that express the horror of war most profoundly. In Otto Dix’s series of prints “Der Krieg” (The War), 1924,…