Reviews - Art in America

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Frierich Petzel

More than a decade before Douglas Crimp's 1977 "Pictures" identified the appropriationist strategies of a generation, Robert Heinecken (1931- 2006) set aside his camera and turned to preexisting media imagery, particularly "the influx of printed promotional material," as he put it in a 1968 statement.

33 Fragments Of Russian Performance

Performa hub

An intriguing exhibition of Russian performance was one of the central elements of Performa 11. The show, titled "33 Fragments of Russian Performance" and organized with Garage center for Contemporary Culture in Moscow, was exactly that: documentary shards (photos and videos primarily) of several dozen works that hinted at what has been happening in Russia since the 1970s.

Sergej Jensen

Galerie Neu

Paintings may be pictures, but they are always objects. The blatant materiality of Sergej Jensen’s canvases made them seem part of the interior architecture of Neu’s gallery. Jensen has consistently had an ambivalent relation to the spaces in which he shows his work. Previously at Neu, he arranged mats on the floor that resembled his patchwork paintings, converting the gallery into a pseudo-living room, the paintings into decor that satirized the convention of a “high-art painting” show.

Dafna Shalom

Petah Tikva Museum of Art

Like many regional art scenes, Israel’s is tightly knit and has its own set of internal references. Artists from the region bear the responsibility of not only unpacking weighty issues but also rendering them communicable to a wider audience. Of late, we’ve seen many Israeli video artists move out of the country (often to Berlin or New York) to pursue this practice, launching successful international careers. In Dafna Shalom’s case, returning to Israel after living in New York for nearly two decades has possibly inspired her to create her best work yet.

Jessica Dickinson

James Fuentes

Jessica Dickinson works on small groups of paintings over a very long time—as much as a year. Each is inspired by some chance observation or physical phenomenon, which, while it constitutes her starting point, will disappear as an image over the course of the painting’s fabrication. The delicacy, even the loss, of the inspiring phenomenon is at odds with the almost overwhelming materiality of the finished work, which recalls Jay DeFeo’s The Rose in its accreted weight.