Will Heinrich
Israeli artist Maya Bloch's "hello stranger," at Thierry Goldberg Projects, is her second solo show in New York. (The first, which you can infer was a success, was at the same gallery six months ago.) Ms. Bloch paints figures formed from drifting waves of clashing, nightmarish color. They look like burning photographs, lifted out of time, but also like accidental convergences on the surface of a shimmering film of gasoline. Some of the figures... MORE >
Wei Dong comes from a context of Socialist Realism, and his painting, while far more elegant, still has the casual accuracy and discreet lean toward mannerism of a propaganda poster. But his subject matter ascends to modes of reality unlikely to be recognized by materialist critics. His "New Paintings" at Nicholas Robinson are full of naked women in states of capture or torture that they don't seem to mind; older people in Mao jackets... MORE >
Tara Donovan is famous for her uncanny ability to reanimate the dead effigies of mass production. She can make several thousand plastic cups, or a dozen huge rolls of adding-machine tape, look delicate and necessary because her acts of mechanical repetition are always inflected with organic variation. (She's breathing new life into Minimalism, too.) Recently she's been looking at nickel-plated steel pins--the kind you'd find on an architect's bulletin board--and her discoveries, in the form... MORE >
After losing a villa in Budapest, being imprisoned by both Germans and Russians, and immigrating to New York, Tibor de Nagy, with John Bernard Myers, founded a marionette company. It failed as a marionette company but reemerged, in 1950, as the Tibor de Nagy Gallery. In honor of its 60th anniversary this year, the gallery, which was also a center for the New York School of poets, has mounted a copious but deftly balanced... MORE >
Patrick Jacobs set seven round lenses into the white walls of Pierogi Gallery in Williamsburg. Behind them you'll think you see close-up, ground-level photographs of pretty, green meadows. (The largest view is monochrome, but the rest are in color.) Far off beyond the fields are winding roads, rivers, bridges, power lines, hills and, in two cases, little towns. It is an otherworldly, overcast day. One town has its lights on and the other doesn't.... MORE >
Robin Williams, in her first solo show, "Rescue Party," at PPOW Gallery, paints flowers, cabbages, bunnies and a cow. She also paints adolescents and figures in bony, epicene, indeterminate childhood who gaze out of surreal scenes with expressions of resignation that fall somewhere between a soldier's and a circus freak's. Her colors are broadly schematized and metallic, as if the product of an interrupted photographic process. Her anatomy is not quite true, but this... MORE >
The first time you go to Tokyo, if you were at all impressed by Blade Runner, you probably change your mind. Tokyoite Yuichi Higashionna is well known for working with white fluorescent lights, but what interests him isn't the light so much as its color--harshly perfect and perfectly false--and in "Fluorescent," at Marianne Boesky, black and white form not only the palette but the... MORE >
More than 40 years ago, Jennifer Bartlett established a simple, ostensibly minimalist method of painting that she has since used to widely varied effect. On a graph-paper grid silkscreened onto baked white enamel, mounted on a square steel plate, she paints colored dots. Sometimes the dots work like pixels, building up patterns or houses or mountains or trees, and sometimes they simply accumulate. Sometimes they grow large enough to cover multiple squares, but more... MORE >
In some European mythologies, the manifold, unstructured world is made from the dismembered body of a primordial giant. Once cut apart, he cannot be reassembled. But certain missionaries declare that it was chaos that came first, and that figures are formed from out of chaos by acts of creative will. The painter Jake Berthot, formerly as committed to abstraction as any other druid, heard the good news in the mid-1990s, after moving to the... MORE >
On the snow-covered Bowery, you can still buy stainless-steel restaurant fixtures, visit the Salvation Army mission or encounter a sprinkling of drunks, but in the shadow of the New Museum, a handful of galleries have sprung up. In Charles Bank Gallery's whiter than white box, seven New York artists have been wrestling with themes of garbage and simulation, to the addictively melancholy sound of "A Whiter Shade of Pale" drifting up from a video... MORE >
How sensitively can a group show be curated--how deftly can works by more than 40 artists be assembled into an aesthetically unitary whole--before the art is reduced to decoration and it becomes impossible to discern the merits of any one piece? If you can't get to the Barnes Foundation, in Merion, Pa., before it closes in January, you can consider the question here in New York at "Looking Back," the fifth White... MORE >
Shadow Fux, at the Swiss Institute in Soho, is a collaboration between painter Rita Ackermann and filmmaker Harmony Korine, but it's not about fusion: It's about... MORE >
DKCT Contemporary on the Bowery is currently hosting cartoonist Sophie Crumb's debut New York show, in conjunction with the release, by W.W. Norton, of Evolution of a Crazy Artist, a full-color, chronological compilation of the artist's drawings dating back to her early childhood. The show is organized not thematically but anthologically. There are a few pretty watercolors (in inkjet reproduction); some single- and double-page comics, including Ms.... MORE >
How is the Internet changing art? Or, to put the question another way, what is the significance of movable type? And is it important that the codex is beginning to replace the scroll? It is, of course--but also, it isn't, so it takes a particularly deft hand to engage questions like these with as much wit, humor and intelligence as "Free" at the New Museum, a show assembled by Lauren Cornell from thoughtful wall... MORE >
"Next Year in Jerusalem," the formula of collective hope--for some Jews literal, for others metaphorical--that conventionally ends the Passover seder, is also the title of Anselm Kiefer's mighty and overwhelming new show at Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street.... MORE >
