Art in America - Most Recent Features

A History of Irritated Material

By Ana Vukadin — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

As Long As It Lasts, From 9 Screens

By David Everitt Howe — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 00:00:00 +0100

Intrigued by Nicolas Guagnini's involvement with defunct Orchard Gallery's conceptual, non-commercial group exhibitions, performances, and lectures, in Spring 2008 the Museum of Modern Art's Kathy Halbreich invited Guagnini to study and critique MoMA's institutional culture for several months. His curatorial project "9 Screens" redresses some of his concerns: the museum's dearth of programming for young, local artists, the long gestation time for its exhibitions, and a lack of alternative sites for display, among others.

Kader Attia

By Gregory Volk — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:28:04 +0100

Kader Attia is a French artist of Algerian descent who grew up in the immigrant banlieues of Paris, sites of poverty, crime and, in 2005, massive rioting. Attia’s excellent exhibition included five lush C-print photographs of Algerians sitting on huge, jumbled concrete blocks at a beach in Algiers that locals call “Rochers Carrés” (Square Rocks).

Florian Baudrexel

By Quinn Latimer — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:23:44 +0100

In the fall of 2007, Germany’s Bielefelder Kunstverein mounted a group show called “New Constructivism” that teased out the not-so-latent Constructivist tendencies of a new generation of abstract painters, sculptors, filmmakers and multimedia artists.

Katinka Bock

By Vivian Rehberg — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:20:48 +0100

Eleven works from 2009 by the young German artist Katinka Bock were on view in “A sculpture for two different ways of doing two different things.” Just through the front door, the makeshift obstacle Einsicht, comprising a tall sheet of plywood set askew and held in place by a large-ish stone on the floor, physically blocked one entry into the gallery.

Grayson Perry

By Helen Weaver — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:18:24 +0100

The English artist Grayson Perry, winner in 2003 of the Turner Prize, is known for his beautifully crafted ceramic pots portraying dark and often disturbing scenes of modern life through figures, patterns and text. He is equally known for his cross-dressing.

Markus Linnenbrink

By Derek Conrad Murray — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:15:47 +0100

“EVERYTHINGEVERYWHEREALLTHE TIME,” Markus Linnenbrink’s latest exhibition, was an impressive showing of 17 works—many of which are a continuation of his now well-known drip paintings made of epoxy resin on wood panels.

Kiel Johnson

By Janet Koplos — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:12:53 +0100

Kiel Johnson’s show of two- and three-dimensional works (all dated 2009) highlighted the manual dexterity and conceptual wit that have earned him recognition in L.A. His busy drawings and quirky constructed sculptures bespeak an exuberant engagement with materials and hand skills, even as they represent near-obsolete machines and technology.

Sean Duffy

By Stephen Maine — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:10:12 +0100

For the last exhibition before reopening in her new space, Susanne Vielmetter turned to Sean Duffy—a fine choice. His work is steeped in nostalgia, and deals with instability, mutability, and the fungibility of original and copy. A kind of social archeology emerges from his handling of cultural artifacts and alterations of familiar objects.

Kate Carr

By Harmony Hammond — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:07:04 +0100

In her recent works, Kate Carr stacks same-sized pieces of fabric or plywood—common utilitarian materials—so only their edges are visible. The resulting sculptures appear to be stacked lines, one of the factors informing the exhibition’s title, “Lineland,” along with its suggestion of a terrain constructed or mapped line by line. While size is determined intuitively, the characteristics of each material—soft or hard, pliable or rigid—affect the orientation, surface variation and contour of each stack.

Maria Martinez-Canas

By Roni Feinstein — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:03:45 +0100

In the photograph titled Doll, a figure in old-fashioned dress appears to float gracefully in a dark, shadowy space. But as soon as the viewer becomes aware of the structure of María Martínez-Cañas’s “Lies” series (2005)—scenes of violent death distorted to near illegibility—the fanciful-seeming image is seen to depict a woman lying dead on a carpet.

29 Chains to the Moon

By Melissa Kuntz — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 11:00:42 +0100

In 1938, Buckminster Fuller observed in his book Nine Chains to the Moon that there were enough humans on earth to form nine chains reaching to the moon; at our current population of 6.7 billion, we could forge an astounding 29.

Chris Fennell

By Stephen Mueller — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:56:03 +0100

“In Little Place a Million” was the title of this first one-person show by Chris Fennell, who works at the more informed fringes of the do-it-yourself esthetic. Using mostly paper on paper in these mixed-medium collages, Fennell arranges tiny paper-punch circles (a raw material often used by Howardena Pindell) in superimposed, slightly off-register radiating patterns.

R.M. Fischer

By Stephen Maine — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:48:03 +0100

Warm and cuddly they are not, but R. M. Fischer’s new, riotously biomorphic sculptures—soft, stitched, stuffed—are unexpectedly bonkers given the artist’s early work. Back in the 1980s, Fischer distinguished himself with sleek, chilly, science fiction-tinged works in steel, brass and aluminum, which often doubled as lighting.

Richard Bell

By Michael Harvey — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:43:59 +0100

This exhibition of 16 paintings and two videos presented, for the first time in the U.S., the work of midcareer Aboriginal artist Richard Bell (b. 1953). Based in Brisbane, Bell managed a health clinic before turning to art, in his early 30s, as a means of protesting the plight of indigenous Australians. He now engages in cocky, irreverent, in-your-face agitprop. The work—combining nihilistic anger with humor—is the sort of thing you might expect if Abbie Hoffman had taken up studio practice.

Richard Mosse

By Lyra Kilston — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:40:29 +0100

There are many ways for photographers to document war, from portraying its victims or perpetrators, to showing the scars it leaves on the landscape, to making images that speak of the disappearance of a certain population. Irish-born photographer Richard Mosse favors recording the wartime wreckage abandoned as junk, creating pictures of the military vehicles and airplanes left rusting in snowbound forests and barren deserts.

Moyra Davey

By Tim Maul — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:30:48 +0100

Moyra Davey’s first show with Murray Guy was an engrossing demonstration of the camera’s ability to isolate detail, organize content and serve agendas both simple and complex. Since the early ’90s, the New York-based photographer has created photographs, videos and publications whose subject matter—including studio ephemera, domestic objects and books—may suggest more sympathy toward the page than the wall.

Roger Ballen

By David Duncan — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:27:53 +0100

After moving from his native New York to South Africa in the late 1970s, Roger Ballen (by his own account) produced exclusively documentary photography, chronicling life in and around Johannesburg. Then, in 1998, he discovered a group of derelict buildings amid an expanse of gold-mine waste dumps on the outskirts of the city.

Christian Holstad

By Alex Gartenfeld — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:25:20 +0100

The title of Christian Holstad’s fifth show at this gallery, “The World’s Gone Beautiful,” referred to Malvina Reynolds’s song about a world that shows its best face only when threatened with extinction. If “What will you wear to your funeral?” is the song’s implicit question, it is doubly compelling for Holstad, who consistently addresses the relationship of identity to overlapping representations of commerce and sexuality.

Yao Lu

By Stephanie Cash — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 10:22:23 +0100

Rarely exhibited in the West, Chinese artist Yao Lu (b. 1967) documents his changing country in atmospheric works that look to the future through the lens of the past. In his first show in the U.S., Yao presented 16 photographs, most circular or rounded windowlike compositions floating on a white ground, 47¼ inches square, with two horizontals measuring 6 and 10 feet across.