Innholdsfortegnelse for April 2015 i ARTnews

BILL POWERS: YOU DIDN’T WANT TO START THIS INTERVIEW UNTIL IT GOT DARK OUT. WHY IS THAT? John Currin: Everything is better to paint in daylight. Sometimes I have a little more vigor at night though, because I feel the ticking clock. You know, the lemons in that new painting, I was too panicky to run down to Duane Reade and get actual lemons so I just mixed up some color in the studio and went at it. Or I’m too lazy to drag the marble slab from that corner to paint from life. I get so impatient that I don’t even want to walk across my studio. BP: WHAT PERCENTAGE OF YOUR WORK DO YOU PAINT OVER THESE DAYS? I WAS ALWAYS SURPRISED AT WHAT I THOUGHT WERE AMAZING…

Whatever else he is—collector, dealer, rich guy—Adam Lindemann is also a man who respects stationary. Just a few days after he announced his gallery, Venus Over Manhattan, would open a 15,000-square-foot space in Los Angeles this spring, the heading on the letters at his 980 Madison Avenue gallery—named for the sculpture the building’s facade—had changed. On a slip of paper attached to the third-floor gallery’s glass door, announcing the next show being installed in Manhattan, the word “Venus” now hovered literally over three smaller words, “Manhattan” to the left, and “Los Angeles” to the right. “We’re just trying it out,” Lindemann shrugged in the plastered under-installation space when asked whether we should just start calling the gallery Venus. Lindemann searched for about six months before settling on his Los Angeles…

Why do certain artists seek extremes? What makes them test their psychological, physical, aesthetic, and moral limits, often in the face of great danger? What do they hope to discover or achieve? Why are they fascinated by risk, uncertainty, the unfamiliar, the other? We in the developed world seem to live increasingly in a virtual realm, largely insulated from reality while bombarded with images, both actual and concocted, through increasingly sophisticated technologies. Others live in regions of devastation, overwhelmed by a reality that is all too real, where there is little choice but to endure. Still others have gone in search of that reality. They are driven to bear witness, to rub against the bone of existence, to see how people survive unholy conditions, and to find ways to capture…

On a gray Sunday last October, during Frieze Week in London, Phillips auction house opened its new headquarters in a 73,000-square-foot building on tony Berkeley Square, with renovations by architects Aukett Swanke. Visitors sipped champagne and orange juice next to a Banksy phone booth that appeared to have erupted out of the concrete floor. The future looked promising. Phillips’s former UK headquarters, near the Victoria train station, had been comparatively bare-bones and far from the action—the action in London these days being in Mayfair, site of international wealth and branches of international mega-galleries like Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner, and Pace. Berkeley Square is in the heart of Mayfair—Gagosian is soon to open a third London space nearby—and Phillips claimed its opening weeks saw a record number of visitors for…

The centerpiece of Danish artist Joachim Koester’s show “Body Electric” was an engrossing 34-minute video projection titled The Place of Dead Roads (2013). Its brown-and-gray set is made up of gnarly wood walls, evoking a corral or a prison camp, with the setting reiterated in the gallery where the video was screened. The four silent protagonists—hyper-vigilant gunslinger-dancers, dressed in modified, mostly grimy white and dusty black cowboy gear—move about in ways suggestive of Hollywood Westerns. Paranoia and lawlessness lurk beneath their gestures and postures, which are alternately coiled and explosive; they eye one another with distrust (or is it lust?) but, despite the violence implied by their movements, they avoid bodily contact. The shots are mainly tight, and the only sound is the scuff of boots on the unseen, gravelly…

The camera obscura has been around since at least the 13th century, but contemporary artists, including Zoe Leonard, Abelardo Morell, Shi Guorui, and Vera Lutter, have recently brought it back into fashion. Lutter’s small but immersive exhibition, featuring six large-scale, unique gelatin silver prints, highlighted her distinctly quiet approach to the camera obscura. The German-born artist has used the technique in her worldwide travels to produce images often composed from rooms or room-size shipping containers, but this show focused on New York, where she is now based. The works shown here ranged from a 1996 view of the Fulton Ferry Landing, taken from Brooklyn, with ephemeral-looking impressions of the Twin Towers that cannot fail to appear ghostly from today’s perspective, to two 2011 views of a construction site on West…

Bastienne Schmidt is not afraid of beauty, or nature, or lyricism, but that is not all that her seductive art is about. She also addresses feminine and feminist issues in some of her large-scale paintings and collages that contain limned figures, fabrics, and objects, as well as in her photographs in which she features largely—but not here. The particular airy, ethereal works in this show, aptly titled “Topography of Quiet,” were nearly all painted, drawn, or photographed in a warm and watery blue and were resolutely abstract, although nature loomed large in the patterning and suggestive gestures that seemed to both seep and force their way through. We sensed swirling waters, sand formations, and cloud patterns all driven by winds and magnetism. There was a melodious current running beneath the…

One of the pioneers of the Light and Space movement, Larry Bell is best known for his glass cubes, both minimal and mysterious, set on boxy pedestals. A thermal evaporation process invests them with reflective capacities or offers a coating of shimmery iridescent color. Not as widely exhibited or reproduced are Bell’s “Standing Walls”—the large-scale freestanding sculptures he created from 1969 through the late 1990s. The barrack-like galleries of Chinati, Donald Judd’s sprawling museum complex in the desert, offer the perfect setting for “6 x 6 An Improvisation,” the first installation of Bell’s “Standing Wall” sculptures to be presented as a single work. The dry specifics are straight out of the Minimalist bible: 32 glass panels, each 6 by 6 feet, some partially coated and some clear or gray, form…

The works in this group show coalesced around the poetic significance of habitual acts and illuminated the mantras that propel us. Harry Dodge’s “emergency weapons” (2003–14) demonstrate the presence of the apocalyptic in the everyday. Among them are a kitchen knife bound to an ax hilt and ornamented with a yellowed ranch-dressing container, and an improvised mace tipped with nails set in a brightly colored blob of resin. During a prolonged stay in the California desert, Leidy Churchman made studies from daily life. The resulting twelve-part painting, Flotsam and Jetsam (2014), which includes a Pepsi logo, a call-box sign, an interior with cats, and a portrait of a border-patrol vehicle, levels the significance of these images by rendering them all in the same naive style. William E. Jones’s Berlin Flash…

Her life embraced the modernist movement like a bright parenthesis. Arriving in Paris in 1905, Ukrainian-born Sonia Delaunay was a major presence in the Paris art scene until her death in 1979. Her output was prodigious, and more than any other artist of her time, she realized the modernist dream of eliminating the barriers between arts, crafts, and technology. With her husband Robert Delaunay and their colleagues, Delaunay pioneered the Orphism movement, often seen as a key stepping-stone between Cubism and pure abstraction. Her own expressive palette was deeply rooted in her Russian childhood, and there was scarcely a medium to which she did not apply her colorful geometries. Paintings, posters, books, household objects, carpets, murals, mosaics, textiles, clothing, and even automobiles would sport her unmistakable aesthetic signature. She also…

For two years after I opened Rental Gallery in L.A.’s Chinatown, I never left my two-block kingdom in the neighborhood because I didn’t have to. Back then, in the mid-aughts, everyone wanted to be in Chinatown. The farthest east I went was Henry Taylor’s studio on Bernard Street. The farthest west I went was the Bank of America on College Street, where I would deposit the money I was making from my new business. I was drinking heavily at this time and suffered delusions of grandeur. I supplied outsiders with artwork, real estate, alcohol, drugs, and whatever else they might have needed, and came to think of myself as the concierge to the little collection of buildings and sidewalk that comprised my entire existence. Nothing so insular can last, though,…

“PATHMAKERS: WOMEN IN ART, CRAFT AND DESIGN, MIDCENTURY AND TODAY” MUSEUM OF ARTS AND DESIGN, NEW YORK APRIL 28 - SEPTEMBER 27 “Pathmakers” focuses on a group of women who, according to the museum, “came to maturity along with the Museum of Arts and Design itself.” (The institution was founded in 1956.) This includes Ruth Asawa, Sheila Hicks, and Lenore Tawney, among others. The show looks particularly at the 1950s and ’60s, a time when women made use of alternative materials while men dominated the mainstream of art and architecture. Hella Jongerius, Polder Sofa, 2014. RYAN SULLIVAN INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI APRIL 16 - AUGUST 20 New York–based painter Ryan Sullivan will have his first solo museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, which opened last…

Simon Denny is an artist who uses the jargon of tech as a readymade. His exhibition this month at MoMA PS1 is titled “The Innovator’s Dilemma,” after the influential 1997 book by Clayton M. Christensen that is notable for coining the now-ubiquitous term “disruptive innovation.” For the show, Denny will present a survey of works structured in the form of a trade fair, complete with presentation booths for each project. “There’s not new work in the show, but having said that, in a way the whole thing is sort of a work, because each of the projects we are tweaking to fit this format,” the New Zealand–born artist (he is representing the country in this year’s Venice Biennale) said in an interview via Skype from Berlin, where he is currently…

Between 1978 and 1979, Dara Birnbaum produced what was to become her signature video piece. Titled Technology/Transformation: Wonder Woman, it consists of a tightly edited seven-minute collage of scenes from the then-popular television series Wonder Woman. The work focuses on the moments when Lynda Carter, the actress portraying Wonder Woman, effected her transformation from boring secretary Diana Prince into a buxom superheroine as she twirled into a blast of light. In short clips, the video presents the heroine running after criminals, repelling bullets, and rescuing a helpless man. Whereas today such samplings of found footage are commonplace, in 1979, when the work was completed, they represented a revolutionary approach to the television medium. As Birnbaum observed in 2002, “It marks a moment in time when I felt I had to…

It’s wonderful to be reminded of how influential Louise Nevelson was and still is. This show of some of her signature black assemblages and many of her less-known collages, gave a sense of her value and range. Beginning with collages from the early ’60s composed of cardboard, wood shards, and spray paint, a pristine sense of order was striking. She most succeeded in extending and monumentalizing the genre in her matte-black painted constructions that united and contained their many disparate elements. Suddenly, whatever their size, the dense compositions became architectural statements, comprising the full idea of domesticity, autobiography, chance, and memory. The selection included the black wood Spring Street (1984)—a surprisingly formal composition with fragments of musical instruments among its found components—as well as a 1985 mixed-media assemblage that gave…

André Gregory’s recent drawings initially appeared to be lovingly remembered scenes of domesticity. Intentionally slapdash, in shades of gray and tan, with pops of color and pattern, the interiors and still lifes are populated with a cast of familiar objects—an antique typewriter, a favorite chair, a collection of love-worn teddy bears—tenderly rendered in apparent haste, as if to capture rapidly fading memories. Expanses of bare white paper were scattered throughout some works, like omitted or forgotten details. In others, off-kilter floors and intersecting spaces lent a dream-like quality to sentimental scenes. In Kitchen I (2014), a kettle and a frying pan are positioned invitingly on a stovetop; the room appears only recently vacated. Meanwhile, the gray-and-black pile of vintage electronics in Wired (2012) looks so longago abandoned one can almost…

Shelly Silver’s work is never autobiographical but it is always first person. “Stories, Cities, Makeshift Structures” at the Slought Foundation surveyed seven of Silver’s films. Each film was experienced from the point of view of a different fictional character: a gay man returning to Chinatown after an absence of 50 years to care for his dying mother (TOUCH, 2013), a woman who advertises for people willing to let her take intimate pictures of them (What I’m Looking For, 2004), a depressed filmmaker—played by the artist herself— wandering through foreign malls and train stations (Suicide, 2003). The films were shot between 1989 and 2013 and the differences in presentation were as marked as the differences between Silver’s characters. Watching Getting In, an amusing one-liner from 1989 that offers the sounds of…

“Charming” seems like a skimpy critical response to this grand retrospective. But charm is a powerful tool for Panamarenko (né Henri Van Herwegen), beloved in his native Belgium for his assemblage sculptures of imaginary flying machines. Reflecting the artist’s own attitude toward his creations, the exhibition alternated between serious and playful in its presentation. Artworks such as a plump, car-size metal contraption reminiscent of the Beatles’s yellow submarine hung from the ceilings and rested on platforms as if they were functional objects, transforming the M HKA into something resembling a surreal air and space museum. In a documentary included in the show, Panamarenko compares his work to Leonardo da Vinci’s and concludes that his art has more poetry than the Renaissance master’s. In this he is arguably correct. When Panamarenko…

Spanning almost 50 years, this survey of work by Toronto-based artist Suzy Lake was an eye-opener. Since moving to Canada from the United States in 1968, Lake has produced photoand performance-based art, much of it critical of media representations of women and alert to forms of political and social control. Lake’s groundbreaking early work includes “A Genuine Simulation of . . .” (1973–74), a series of photographic self-portraits retouched with Covergirl makeup, and Miss Chatelaine (1973), a grid of blackand-white photos of the artist, each embellished with a different hat or head of hair cut from Chatelaine, a Canadian women’s magazine. Lake’s imagery becomes more aggressive as the decade progresses. In her “Choreographed Puppets” series (1976–77), for example, the artist donned a contraption that allowed two men to literally “pull…

“I’m going to madness,” said Michael Craig-Martin, when reached at his studio in London in late January. “Every day I’m on the verge of being overwhelmed.” At 73, Craig-Martin, a former teacher who several so-called Young British Artists (YBAs) have credited as an influence, is having the busiest year of his life. In March, a series of his large Pop-inflected sculptures (a stiletto, a pitchfork, scissors, etc.) was erected in the gardens of Chatsworth House, the home of the Duke and Duchess of Devonshire, in England. He had just returned from Shanghai, where 50 of his paintings were about to go on view at the Shanghai Himalayas Museum (February 2 to March 21), and was preparing for an extravaganza in Dallas in April, when he will be the honoree artist…

One recent morning, art historian Nada Shabout was telling me about her search for a graduate program two decades ago. “When I contacted universities and said I wanted to work on modern Arab art, they would say, ‘What is that? There is no such thing!’” Shabout said. Academics pointed her to Middle Eastern studies or Islamic art departments. “Now, at least,” she said, “schools are not saying that.” Shabout earned a Ph.D. in the humanities from the University of Texas at Arlington and is currently an associate professor of art history at the University of North Texas. She is one of a small band of curators and art historians in the West who specialize in modern Middle Eastern art—avant-garde art made in the region beginning in the middle of the…

This exhibition of the work of Israeli-born artist Ron Arad was a departure from the daringly innovative projects that made him an international design star. Here he presented, as the show’s main component, a series of crushed Fiat 500s in various automotive colors. Called “Pressed Flowers,” the cars were indeed pressed, with their surfaces battered and their innards artfully compacted, protruding here and there. But it was hardly in a flowerlike way; the irony was misapplied. Instead, they hung awkwardly on the wall like bagged animals from an industrial safari, only mangled like roadkill—or what they were, crushed cars. Unfortunately, the pathetic objects also evoked images of devastating accidents (Arad’s father was in a Fiat in an accident that nearly killed him) and of the zillions of defective cars recalled…

Bill Walton made singular choices. He gave equal time to every formal constituent of these ten undated pieces, putting weight on par with position and color with substance. Red Floor / White Floor—a reddish beam of reclaimed flooring, measuring 5 by 8 by 1½ inches—is shot through with nail holes. Notched at one end, it sits on two iron ingots of different lengths; the lintel’s top face is painted a smoky white that switches, two thirds of the way down, to brass leaf. In Folded Black Etching Paper, a long strip of black paper is folded twice and then pressed to the wall with a yellow pencil covered in muddy gray paint. A layer of white gouache reduces the paper’s dense black to a ghostly blue, and two silvery nailheads…

In conjunction with her M.F.A. thesis work at Hunter College, which focused on the photograms of László Moholy-Nagy and Man Ray, Susan Bee began conducting her own extensive darkroom experiments. The project continued into the early 1980s and, as this quietly dazzling array of 89 photograms and altered photos demonstrated, embraced painterly procedures and a fluid attitude toward drawing as organization, as a mode of thinking. In these small, untitled sheets, recognizable images were discernable—the artist’s face, a group of choirboys, scissors, blossoms—but they are immersed in a rich matrix derived from found negatives, brushed-on developer, hand-applied aniline dye and wax crayon, solarization, and apparent multiple exposures. A purely abstract series of photograms featuring layered translucent triangles on a sooty gray ground is a study in tonal control, but the…

Adriana Varejão’s first solo museum show in the United States presented a full range of her works from 1992 to 2014, many referring to Brazil’s colonial history. In her relief painting Carpet-Style Tilework in Live Flesh (1999) sculpted purplish-red viscera seem to spill from a torn-open wall of delicate blue-and-white Portuguese tiles. A commentary on the brutality of colonization, the piece puts into action Brazilian critic Oswald de Andrade’s exhortation to artists to “cannibalize” the culture of their colonizers. Equally jarring was Votive Offering and Skins (1993), a collection of what appear to be scraps of differently colored flesh, numbered and tacked to a canvas. It was inspired by 17th- and 18th-century Spanish and Portuguese casta paintings, which ranked mixed-race people according to parentage and relative lightness of skin. In…

Ranging from Jeff Koons’s floating basketballs to Ai Weiwei’s garishly painted Han vases, this show could have been faulted for taking an over-broad view of what constitutes Pop. Yet the exhibition demonstrated, fascinatingly, how Pop migrated post-Warhol to the Soviet Union and then to China, turning, as it did so, the cold light it once shone on mass consumerism onto authoritarian hero worship. Alexander Kosolapov’s conceptual gambits such as Lenin and Coca-Cola (1982), in which a slogan for marketing soft drinks (“It’s the Real Thing”) is applied to a revolutionary leader, looks almost quaint now but in its day was genuinely provocative. Leonid Sokov’s pairing of Stalin and Marilyn Monroe in Two Profiles (1989) underscores Pop’s interest in the iconic image, an idea both supported and subverted in Feng Mengbo’s…

In Ukrainian artist Nikita Kadan’s solo exhibition “Limits of Responsibility,” a slideshow focused on a modest vegetable patch in Kiev’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti (Independence Square). The garden was planted by pro-European Union, anti-government protesters last spring and destroyed four months later—possibly by right-wing nationalists—following the collapse of the Yanukovych government. This agricultural theme was echoed throughout the show, which also included ominous watercolors that merged anatomical with architectural and botanical forms and vintage Soviet agricultural propaganda pamphlets. The gallery was dominated by an all-white sculpture, which replicated a display structure for agricultural exhibits pictured in one of the pamphlets. Kadan’s version featured a thriving bed of lettuces and herbs, but the information panels had been left blank—utopian ideals have vanished, but citizen gardening remains vital, both for survival and as an…