Rachel Wetzler

The artist Paulina Ołowska's work of the past two decades has often taken up the abandoned relics of socialist modernism, swiftly condemned to the dustbin of history by the architects of the nation’s post-Communist transition: Warsaw’s neon signs, the graphic design of ’60s magazines like Ty i Ja, the interiors of workers’ cafés. .. Read more

Dangling on the walls from matching silk cords were eight new paintings by Cynthia Talmadge, each rendering a different view of the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel’s facade in an exacting pointillism... Read more

Is Lisa Yuskavage a feminist? When she began exhibiting her candy-colored paintings of barely legal pinups in the early 1990s, it was a question that endlessly preoccupied critics... Read more

Charline von Heyl’s oeuvre is characterized by its elusiveness: over the past three decades, she has persistently refused to develop a cohesive style, instead moving freely between disparate painterly modes... Read more

During the 1940s and ’50s, the Chicago-based Surrealist Gertrude Abercrombie (1909–1977) was known locally as the “queen of the bohemian artists.”.. Read more

In the early 2000s, Banks Violette was everywhere: in sold-out gallery shows, in the Whitney Biennial, in the pages of the New York Times Style section... Read more

Ursula von Rydingsvard treats the regularity of the grid as a point of departure, something to be manipulated and made strange. .. Read more

The inaugural edition of the Riga International Biennial of Contemporary Art, “Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More,” is titled after a 2005 book by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak addressing the inherent paradox underlying the Soviet experience of Communism’s end. .. Read more

Curator Gabi Ngcobo opens her introductory essay for the catalogue of the tenth Berlin Biennale by invoking an empty pedestal: that which once held a statue commemorating the nineteenth-century British colonialist Cecil Rhodes that was taken down at the University of Cape Town as a result of the Rhodes Must Fall protests, which swept South African and British universities in 2015... Read more

Matta-Clark often used the term “anarchitecture” to express his approach to the built environment... Read more

In the early 1980s, Kenny Scharf, barely out of art school, emerged as a central protagonist of the short-lived, much mythologized East Village scene—a milieu that was celebrated as a neo-neo-avant-garde that collapsed the divide between high and low in its embrace of street culture and, alternately, derided as a bunch of publicity-hungry dilettantes whose bohemian posturing was aimed mostly at the market. By the end of the decade, the scene had been declared dead. Some of its best artists were dead, too... Read more

The three sculptures in Syrian American artist Diana Al-Hadid’s recent exhibition “Falcon’s Fortress” (all 2017) took their cues from timekeeping devices detailed in the book: “candle clocks” in which melting candles would trigger complex systems of counterweights and pulleys to release metal balls from the mouths of falcon figures at certain intervals, marking the hours as they passed... Read more

The works recycle a number of conventional painterly tropes, depicting idyllic landscapes and pretty flowers overlaid with swooping gestural abstractions. .. Read more

Walking through the apparently hijinks-free gallery, I wondered if the artists-now pushing fifty years old-had decided it was finally time to grow up... Read more