Art in America - Most Recent Features

Rineke Dijkstra

By Colin Westerbeck — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Ordinarily, a portrait photograph isolates a single moment in the life of its subject. Portraits may imply the presence of traits that subjects bring to the studio-qualities that they have acquired over many years and will continue to possess for the rest of their days. Nonetheless, like a biological specimen seen under a microscope, the portrait makes a slice of life so thin as to be transparent under light. Still, Rineke Dijkstra keeps inventing ways to drag elapsed time into her portraits, as this career retrospective demonstrates.

Andrea Buttner

By Charlotte Bonham-Carter — Tue, 15 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

A sense of humbleness pervaded "Moos/Moss," Andrea Büttner's second exhibition at Hollybush Gardens. A sparse, largely gray installation, the show rang changes on the idea of insignificance and was evidence of Büttner's continuing interest in notions of wealth and poverty.

Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook

By Maura Reilly — Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The Thai artist Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook is perhaps best known for her video documentation of performances in which she chants, sings and reads to cadavers in a hospital morgue. Since 2008, however, she has been engaged with an entirely different subject: the intercultural translatability of artworks and the demystification of Western art. Her first solo exhibition in New York showcased four videos and several related digital prints.

Gary Petersen and Halsey Hathaway

By Jeff Frederick — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Showing a softer side to hard-edge abstraction, the paintings of Gary Petersen and Halsey Hathaway, both New York-based, nicely complemented each other in a recent exhibition at Storefront Bushwick. Petersen's paintings are made of straight, beamlike forms, often wedges, which combine to make parallelograms or triangles. Hathaway's shapes are intersecting arcs, bulging or crescent on the inside, squared off on the outside where they meet thin borders that run parallel to the edges of the canvas. The works of both painters are meticulously constructed, leaving you to feel you are in good hands.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

By Harmony Hammond — Wed, 09 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Landscapes of an American Modernist" was the fourth exhibition in the Living Artists of Distinction Series at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, honoring those making an important contribution to American modernism. The previous honorees were Anne Truitt (2000), Sherrie Levine (2007) and Susan Rothenberg (2010).

Kim MacConnel

By Stephen Westfall — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

This mini-survey of Kim MacConnel's unstretched fabric paintings from the 1970s, and a terrific one from 2004, is the first of four shows at Salomon this spring collectively titled "American Responses: Pleasure, Reverence, Heart, Home." The successive exhibitions feature work by MacConnel, Ned Smyth, Dickie Landry and Tina Girouard, artists from different parts of the country who were making seminal work in the 1970s and '80s, and who are still active.

Craig Drennen

By Rebecca Dimling Cochran — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Timon of Athens is an unfinished Shakespeare play that was never produced during his lifetime. In it, the wealthy Timon gives away all his money to his friends, who then turn against him when he needs their help. Artist Craig Drennen was attracted to the play's obscurity and to the title character, who becomes misanthropic, writing in his own ambiguous epitaph, "Here lie I, Timon, who, alive, all living men did hate." Four years ago, Drennen began to use the play as the conceptual framework to make artworks that represent a defining characteristic of each character's personality. In 2007, he made paintings depicting the play's Mistresses as lush pink anuses, and in 2008 he painted the Flattering Lords as daisies, a pretty if common flower.

Antonia Gurkovska

By Susan Snodgrass — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

As suggested by the exhibition's title, Antonia Gurkovska (b. 1984, Bulgaria) presented a lexicon of painting in her first solo show, "Index." Even as she did so, however, she rejected gestural painterly idioms and adherence to the picture plane for practices decidedly three-dimensional; press materials liken Gurkovska to Lucio Fontana and Rudolf Stingel in her use of unconventional materials and methods of mark-making that rupture the paintings' surfaces to explore spatial concepts.

Balazs Kicsiny

By Jessica Baran — Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Balázs Kicsiny's installation "Killing Time" (2012) seems plucked from a lost Peter Greenaway film-some arch pantomime of pleasure courting death in a halted interstice of time. One enters a single, immersive installation, not unlike a movie set, via an unlit corridor filled only with the discordance of three overlapping soundtracks: the rumble of military radio transmissions, the dull thwack of thrown knives hitting a target and the clatter of dinnerware at a bustling restaurant.

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib with C. Spencer Yeh

By Jennie Hirsh — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib's 1967 (2011), a multichannel video installation, is a colorful and synesthetic tour-de-force work that combines borrowed and original moving images, including scenes from Godard's film La Chinoise (1967), footage of the Montreal Expo from the same year, Chinese film from the Cultural Revolution and YouTube videos of recent Arab Spring protests. Through the complex layering of images and superimposed subtitle-like text written by the artists, the piece underscores both the mechanical activities of revolutionaries and the politicized nature of mass media, conflating real and imagined events and highlighting how we see through multiple cinematic lenses.

Geoff Hippenstiel

By Raphael Rubinstein — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Nearly all the paintings in this show of recent work by Geoff Hippenstiel, a Houston-based painter in his late 30s, feature a single massive shape occupying most of the available space. Depending on their contours, these forms, which are made up of countless painterly events, can read as mounds, tilted irregular planes or rough-hewn ovals suggestive of heads or stones.

Jean Dupuy

By Anne Rochette, Wade Saunders — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The French octogenarian Jean Dupuy was an abstract painter until the mid-'60s, when he moved to New York and began pursuing technological and optical experiments and performance. In 1984 he returned to France, to a village near Nice, where, ever since, he has made paintings and objects that are often driven by language games.

Cevdet Erek

By Aoife Rosenmeyer — Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Cevdet Erek breaks time—and thus our experience of life—into units. Based in Istanbul, the young Turkish artist studied architecture, has a PhD in music and plays drums in an experimental rock band. His temporal dissection at the Kunsthalle Basel began outside, where red lights on a dot matrix screen suspended above the elegant doorway to the institution could be seen blinking the word "WEEK" (WEEK, 2012). The electronic panel jarred with the stone facade, particularly given that the Kunsthalle is nestled in an area with old buildings housing staid cultural institutions.

Cheyney Thompson

By Peter R. Kalb — Fri, 04 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

"Cheyney Thompson: metric, pedestal, landlord, cabengo, recit," the artist's first museum survey, was something of a homecoming. Thompson graduated from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in 1997 and stayed in Boston the following year, cofounding the Oni Gallery. (He currently lives and works in New York, where he shows at Andrew Kreps Gallery.) There was little nostalgia on display, however, in an exhibition that encouraged a reading of Thompson's practice as an entanglement of institutional critique and personal experience.

L.A. Raw

By Leah Ollman — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

"A bloody and bony parcel bearing the imprint of trouble" was how Rico Lebrun referred, in a 1963 interview, to the human figure shaped by circumstances of his day. Lebrun's painting Buchenwald Cart (1956), loaded with ashen limbs, his 1960 ink homage Untitled (De Sade) and his sunken-eyed bronze Head (1961) launch the intensely visceral ride that is "L.A. RAW: Abject Expressionism in Los Angeles 1945-1980, From Rico Lebrun to Paul McCarthy." Like many of the "Pacific Standard Time" projects, the show, including over 120 works by 41 artists, serves as a historical corrective, in this case restoring visibility to a strain of figurative art long overshadowed by postwar abstract movements. Curated by Michael Duncan (an A.i.A. contributing editor), "L.A. RAW" presents a continuum of body-centered art driven by both collective trauma and personal, psychosexual reckoning.

Kader Attia

By Mark Prince — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

The documentary mode of film, with its assumption of investigative objectivity, has become a useful template for artists to convert to their own purposes. At worst, this can mean no more than stripping film reportage of its functional trappings-such as the informative voiceover-and enlarging it onto a gallery wall. Collages (2011), Kader Attia's hour-long three-channel video installation about the lives of transsexuals in Algiers and Bombay, questions the possibility of objective testimony at the same time as it challenges the structural coherence we associate with artistic narrative.

Goshka Macuga

By Gregory Volk — Tue, 01 May 2012 00:00:00 +0100

This was the first museum exhibition in Poland, and a major homecoming, for London-based Goshka Macuga (b. 1967), a 2008 Turner Prize finalist, whose eclectic, mixed-medium projects often involve substantial historical research.

Doug Wheeler

By David Duncan — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Among the few sensations unavailable in New York City is the feeling of uninterrupted space. When people scan their surroundings here, a progression of objects, bodies or architectural impediments inevitably enters and defines their fields of vision. On four occasions, the first being at Salvatore Ala Gallery in Milan in 1975, the seminal Light and Space artist Doug Wheeler has crafted what he calls "infinity environments"-interior installations designed to offer seemingly boundless spaces.

Joyce Pensato

By Faye Hirsch — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

In spring 2011, Joyce Pensato lost a real-estate battle over her studio in Williamsburg and had to vacate the premises. She had been there for more than 30 years. Inside, apart from a number of inprocess monumental canvases and large drawings—works on view in her recent exhibition at Petzel—was a massive accumulation of found images and objects bespattered with paint. Photographs of the studio taken before she moved out—most shot by her, and collected in her new artist’s book, The Eraser—show the place as a species of Gesamtkunstwerk in which distinctions between finished artwork and inspirational matter were hazy at best.

Thomas Scheibitz

By David Humphrey — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0100

Something seemed off as you ap- proached the room’s only column. It rose to just a couple of inches short of the ceiling beam and rested on an unprimed canvas. Turns out it was a sculpture, as was a nearby table dis- playing a selection of framed works on paper. The artist, Thomas Scheibitz, is a master thwarter of expectations.