Author Archive
Trompe Liu
Capturing Artists in the Midst Liu Bolin, the “invisible man,” uses photography to turn himself into a ghost. Liu’s“Lost in the City” series shows the artist blending perfectly into cityscapes in his native China; another series shows Liu Lost in New York. He’s recently gone in a new direction with his “Lost in Fashion” series,...
In Her Own Worlds
Bharti Kher’s Sculptured Spaces Bharti Kher’s work manages to be big, open and intensely private all at once. Her pieces draw you in; they demand a certain amount of time. The current exhibit at the Hauser & Wirth gallery, The Hot Winds that Blow from the West, contains only a handful of works, but each...
Aluminum Origami
David Rodriguez Caballero Sculpts Nature There is something unbelievably tender about the aluminum in David Rodriguez Caballero’s sculptures, on display for just a few more days at the Marlborough Gallery in Chelsea. The Spain-born artist sands down the metal to give it a soft, flat shine and then folds it like big pieces of origami...
Cops and Blotters
Looking behind the scene of the crime In 1972, the photographer Leonard Freed set out to document the daily lives of New York City police officers. He wanted to humanize the police force, arguing that “if we do not concern ourselves with who the police are—who they really are…we run the real risk of finding...
Original Copies: Fu Baoshi adapts to revolution
The title of The Metropolitan Museum’s new Chinese painting exhibit, Chinese Art in an Age of Revolution: Fu Baoshi (1904-1965), is misleading. The painter in question did live through the establishment of the Chinese Republic, the Sino-Japanese wars and the rise of the Communist party, but Fu is far more academic than revolutionary. It is...
Spotland
Journey through Hirst’s dotty past Damien Hirst is tapping into a simple fact: We all like smooth surfaces and bright colors. Since 1986, the bad boy British artist, notorious for his installations of floating animals in cases of formaldehyde, has produced about 1,500 spot paintings, white canvases covered in colorful circles. (He has an army...
Energy in Blossoms: Benson’s colors and China’s blossoms
Trudy Benson’s painting is full of physical energy. The paint is applied so thickly that it turns into an object in its own right; the stripes and circles on the canvas look like moveable parts. Fittingly, most of the pieces in her show at Mike Weiss Gallery, Actual/Virtual, evoke outer space with their names—“Cosmic Comics,”...
Junkyard of the Future
Barney’s NEW Anthro Art “This is some crap from outer space,” said one teenager admiringly as he circled the first room of the Matthew Barney exhibit in the Gladstone Gallery. And he was right: the works do look a little bit like asteroids. They’ve traveled a long way to get to us.
Real and Surreal Juxtaposed
D’Apres Nature (and Music) Rescue Magritte Juxtaposition is educational. Set two unrelated objects side by side, and they’ll awaken entirely new ideas in the spectator. This, anyway, is the driving principle behind an engrossing exhibit—La Carte d’Apres Nature—at the Matthew Marks Gallery.
Form And Fashion
Can fashion photography be classed as art? How have fashion magazines changed over the decades? What is fashion’s relationship with the natural world? These are just some of the questions raised by the gorgeous Form and Fashion exhibit at the Staley-Wise gallery, where 90-year-old works by the French photographer George Hoynigen-Huene hang side by side...
Solo Exhibitions
A series of Hugh Bell photographs, now on display at the Soho Photo Gallery, shows us great jazz musicians caught in moments of silence. Billie Holiday stands in her dressing room, squinting and holding a cigarette. Charlie Parker holds onto his saxophone and looks mournfully into the distance. These are intimate moments. The musicians here...
Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou
The newly mounted Picasso exhibit at the Chelsea branch of the Gagosian Gallery pays homage to one of Picasso’s longest-running love affairs: the secret relationship he carried out with a young French woman named Marie-Thérèse Walter. The show, subtitled L’amour fou, or crazy love, showcases some 80 portraits of Marie-Thérèse. It’s a lush exhibit, worthy...
Zhang Dali: New Slogan
The men and women in Zhang Dali’s exhibition New Slogan, now on view at the Eli Klein gallery in Soho, stare out at us from within their big frames. They’re compelling. But what do they have to tell us? New Slogan is an exploration of the way that rules and propaganda can mute ordinary human...
Fresh Faces
Artists that ‘re-invent’ the African mask may actually have more to say about themselves Curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art want to change the way we look at African masks. In a new exhibit, Reconfiguring an African Icon: Odes to the Mask by Modern and Contemporary Artists from Three Continents, the museum makes the...
