Concise, critical reviews of books, exhibitions, and projects in all areas and periods of art history and visual studies

Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Michael Rooks, ed.
Exh. cat. Atlanta: High Museum of Art in association with Yale University Press, 2015. 176 pp.; 100 color ills. Cloth $45.00 (9780300215717)
Exhibition schedule: High Museum of Art, Atlanta, June 21–September 6, 2015; Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao, October 16, 2015–January 31, 2016
Alex Katz, This Is Now offers a refreshing look at Katz’s landscapes, which, as the exhibition clearly demonstrates, have occupied the artist throughout his career. Those primarily familiar with Katz’s figurative work and portraiture, subjects for which he is arguably best known, discover another, important aspect of Katz’s oeuvre, one that does not entirely leave the figures behind, while those already knowledgeable about his landscapes enjoy compelling compositions and provocative pairings that deepen an appreciation of the artist’s achievements in this genre. Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michael Rooks brings together around fifty paintings, from… Full Review
July 7, 2016
Thumbnail
Sylvie Patry, ed.
Exh. cat. Philadelphia, London, and Paris: Philadelphia Museum of Art, National Gallery, London, and Réunion des Musées Nationaux-Grand Palais, 2015. 304 pp.; 150 color ills. Cloth (9780876332610)
Exhibition schedule: Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, October 9, 2014–February 8, 2015; National Gallery, London, March 4–May 31, 2015; Philadelphia Museum of Art, June 24–September 13, 2015
Visitors to the exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were funneled through a darkened passageway bordered by two fictive windows through which one glimpsed large archival photographs of two of Paul Durand-Ruel’s major galleries. On the left was his Paris establishment from 1869 until 1882 at 16 rue Laffitte, while on the right was his first New York branch on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1887, and a testament to the dealer’s ambitious foray into the international market. Once past this threshold, museumgoers were greeted by an 1866 portrait of a… Full Review
June 30, 2016
Thumbnail
Mexico City: Museo Tamayo, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, March 26–August 16, 2015; Museo de Arte Latinoamericano de Buenos Aires, Buenos Aires, November 6, 2015–February 15, 2016; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Havana, April 8–May 31, 2016; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, September, 2016–January, 2017
Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has long been interested in socio-political issues stemming from territory and displacement within marginalized communities, as witnessed through the vestiges of immigration, natural disasters, and warfare. Thus, it is no surprise that these themes feature prominently in three projects in his major solo exhibition, A Story of Negotiation, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and beautifully displayed at the Museo Tamayo. Installed in three generously sized white-cube spaces, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008), Tornado (2000–2010), and Reel-Unreel (2011) consist of a symbiotic relationship between the artist’s chosen mediums of… Full Review
June 16, 2016
Thumbnail
New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, NY, May 1–September 27, 2015
Organized around twenty-three chapters, each of which takes its name from the title of an artwork included in that section, America Is Hard to See, the inaugural exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, jettisoned a purely chronological or conventional art-movement “ism” organizational structure in favor of a thematic one. The result challenged traditional (one might say, outmoded) categories of art history and created unexpected juxtapositions that pushed viewers to understand that history—and the history of the United States—in fresh ways. The exhibition does move in linear fashion from the eighth floor to the fifth; but… Full Review
June 9, 2016
Thumbnail
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, March 21, 2015–October 25, 2015
Nestled in a small gallery in the Ahmanson Building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and timed to coincide with the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971 offers viewers new insights into one of the institution’s most legendary curatorial endeavors. Organized by Associate Curator Jennifer King, From the Archives draws from various institutional holdings in order to reflect on how, by linking the visual arts to an expansive nexus of economic and political concern (the aerospace companies, movie studios, and industrial conglomerates that powered the greater Los Angeles region during the… Full Review
June 9, 2016
Thumbnail
Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin
, eds.
Exh. cat. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2015. 368 pp.; 164 color ills. Paper $45.00 (9781606064405)
Exhibition schedule: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence, March 14–June 21, 2015; J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, July 28–November 1, 2015; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC, December 13, 2015–March 24, 2016
Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, curated by Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, opens with an empty limestone base from Corinth featuring cuttings for the feet of a bronze figure and inscribed “Lysippos made [this].” In his Natural History (34.37), Pliny credits Lysippos with creating 1,500 bronze statues, none of which have survived. The base serves as a stark reminder of how few large-scale bronze sculptures remain today while also presaging themes explored in this remarkable exhibition. The Hellenistic period stretched from the late fourth-century BCE reign of Alexander the Great until the rise of… Full Review
June 2, 2016
Thumbnail
Palm Springs: Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, 2015.
Exhibition schedule: Palm Springs Art Museum Architecture and Design Center, March 14–July 26, 2015
The experience of seeing Andrea Zittel’s recent exhibition at the newly opened Architecture and Design Center at the Palm Springs Art Museum is probably somewhat unusual given what many of us have come to expect of contemporary art shows in prominent art-world epicenters. The space, for one thing, is a repurposed bank originally designed in 1961 by the beloved local architect E. Stewart Williams, and its recent renovation by the Los Angeles-based firm Marmol Radziner leaves intact such features as the vault (now home to a small gift shop) and a drive-up window that juts unobtrusively into the exhibition area… Full Review
May 26, 2016
Thumbnail
Michael A. Brown and Niria E. Leyva-Guttíerrez
Exh. cat. San Diego: San Diego Museum of Art, 2015. 45 pp.; 32 color ills. Paper $19.95 (9780937108520)
Exhibition schedule: San Diego Museum of Art, San Diego, March 28–June 30, 2015
Divine Desire: Printmaking, Mythology, and the Birth of the Baroque at the San Diego Museum of Art was an exhibition of over seventy late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Netherlandish engraved prints, mostly by Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617), his pupil and stepson Jacob Matham (1571–1631), and student Jan Pietersz Saenredam (1565–1607). The subject matter of the prints is predominantly mythological and secular, apart from a series on the virtues and vices. In selecting this subject matter, curator Michael A. Brown complemented material presented in another local exhibition, that of Goltzius’s sacred prints held in 2013–14 at the Crocker Art Museum and University… Full Review
Thumbnail
Okwui Enwezor, ed.
Exh. cat. 2 volumes. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015. 1054 pp. Paper $130.00 (978883172128)
Exhibition schedule: Venice, May 9—November 22, 2015
Picturing the World: Painting at the 56th Venice Biennale Plenty has already been written about the daily recitations of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital at the 56th Venice Biennale, a gesture that served to recapitulate our nervous twitching about art and money. Across the grand swath of global art on display, there were indeed many compelling moments pointing to capitalism as the hoary culprit in our world of excess and inequity. Typically, at the heart of such claims in relation to the art world one finds the medium of painting. With its easel format, its desirability as status and… Full Review
May 18, 2016
Thumbnail
Okwui Enwezor, ed.
Exh. cat. 2 volumes. Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2015. 1054 pp. Paper $130.00 (978883172128)
Exhibition schedule: Venice, May 9—November 22, 2015
Environmental Art at the 56th Venice Biennale The 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, focuses on the unpredictability and volatility of our historical moment, or what in another context Ulrich Beck calls the “risk society” (Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, London: Sage, 1992). As Michelle Kuo explains in an interview with Enwezor: “That is when the unintended side effects of modernization—technological, ecological—seem to be overwhelming the systems devised to contain them, creating entirely new crises and instabilities” (Michelle Kuo, “Global Entry: Okwui Enwezor Talks with Michelle Kuo about the 56th Venice Biennale,” Artforum… Full Review
May 18, 2016
Thumbnail