News & Opinion - Art in America

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New Representation: Stefania Bortolami

After five years on 510 West 25th Street, Stefania Bortolami has packed up her eponymous gallery and moved a few blocks south.

Bortolami Gallery inaugurated its new space on West 20th last week with "Redressing," open through November 6. The exhibition features work from many of the artists who have previously participated in a group show at the gallery, including gallery artists like Daniel Buren, Richard Aldrich, and Aaron Young, and friends like Hanna Liden, David Salle, Tim Noble and Sue Webster.
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Conquering Cartoons: David Shrigley

by Kimberly Chou 9/16/10

A show of new work by David Shrigley is open now through October 23 at Anton Kern Gallery. The exhibition includes dozens of his simple pen-and-paint drawings—what the artist is best known for, and medium in which he works most frequently-as well as sculpture and an animated short film.

There's the sense that Shrigley's work has conquered each possible exhibition surface at Anton Kern, inside and out.

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Adam Fuss Teaches Morality

by Kimberly Chou 9/10/10

It's a history that's likely unknown to those who grew up with it as Chutes and Ladders: The game Snakes and Ladders began as a Jain morality-teaching tool in 16th Century India. Snakes and ladders on the checkered board represented the bad and good deeds of life, respectively. On older versions of the game board, to finish one must land on the last square, where a ladder leads up to Nirvana—sometimes depicted as the smiling face of God.
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The Serious Joke: The Objects of Jay Heikes

by Kimberly Chou 8/30/10

For the past five years, Jay Heikes' work has revolved around one big joke. In the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist showed stills from a video that showed him as a stand-up comic, puppet in hand, telling a joke about a pirate and its obstinate parrot. Shot in one take while Heikes was finishing graduate school at Yale, So There's This Pirate (2005) follows the parrot's refusal to obey its owner and the pirate's resultant identity crisis, mimicking the artist's constant evaluation of his own work.
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Birds and Beans

by Kimberly Chou 8/9/10

For two years, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird and aritst Ian Schneller have been planning a "sonic arboretum" of different-sized horns.

"The horns kind of evolved from being more this Victrola aesthetic to more a plant-like shape, some sort of prairie flowers, kind of facing toward the sky," said Bird, in an interview in advance of his performance at the Guggenheim Thursday night. "So I kind of like this idea of possibly modeling different environments through these horns. I'm interested in the acoustics of different environments: If you're in Zion National Park and you're surrounded by these canyon walls and these trees, what kind of sounds fill this space? Or if you're in a field of soy beans, what does that sound like?"
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