The first time you push through a scrum of tourist flashbulbs to peer through bulletproof glass at the Mona Lisa, you’ll see a painting whose image is so familiar that it may well disappoint. Behind that glass does remain an object that, if you peer through its nimbus of fame, you can see. But what Read More
Trying to prove that Los Angeles is an art world center second to none, as the organizers of “Greater LA” have done by bringing the work of several dozen LA artists to a loft on lower Broadway seems, at first, like an unwitting irony. So does proposing that a center can be “distinctly horizontal”–i.e., decentralized. Read More
Soho Eckstein, South African artist William Kentridge’s self-portrait as beneficiary of white privilege, is feeling nostalgic for the clarity of a well-turned lie. Eckstein, as always, remains in Johannesburg, but Mr. Kentridge’s latest stop-motion animated portrait of him is playing at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York.
Onto the film’s title, “Other Faces,” fall two Read More
Some artists are ahead of their time, but some, so to speak, work in parallel. Like others of his generation, the New York painter Leland Bell, who died in 1991, took modernist abstraction as his starting point. But unlike his peers, who turned to new problems, Mr. Bell turned to the human figure for a Read More
Some boys like to make ships in a bottle. But some, apparently, prefer to make endearingly disturbing replicas of assault rifles, bazooka shells, pistols and guns from the video game Halo out of copier paper and Scotch tape. They post instructional videos on YouTube and sometimes adapt their guns to shoot conical paper blow darts. Read More
In the 1980s, Holt Quentel was noted for turning fresh canvas into faux-distressed tarpaulins emblazoned with iconic letters and numbers, and for appropriating mass-produced Eames chairs for display. Klaus Ottman, in a catalog, said, “She escapes the fatality of simulation by overwinding it an extra turn that puts her at the beginning of time.” Roberta Read More
The author is dead, but Cosima von Bonin is the resurrection. She can turn commission, collaboration, appropriation, performance and even the making of objects into a series of feints and disclaimers, so that meaning is enclosed but not pinned down and the artist’s absence itself becomes a singular presence.
“The Juxtaposition of Nothings,” at Friedrich Read More
For the next few weeks, the painter Robert Feintuch will be slouching around the walls of the Sonnabend Gallery. Using himself as a model, Mr. Feintuch paints a single male figure wearing only white boxer shorts, usually alone but sometimes doubled or tripled. He stands in front of a blank wall in an exaggerated shade Read More
“An image-maker,” writes the photographer Ari Marcopoulos, “is asked to make distinctions and decisions on what to extract. Having been involved in this practice for over 30 years, I started to try and free myself from even my own expectations.”
He did so by shooting whatever he saw and storing the images as piles of Read More
Once, during a serious conversation in a friend’s apartment, my friend’s 1-year-old son wandered into the room, listened to us talking, and then carefully squatted down between us and defecated on the floor. I forget what we’d been talking about, but I’ve never forgotten that final word.
Since the 1990s, inspired by a reference in Read More
