Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

In October of 1977, eight months after the German painter Blinky Palermo’s death at the age of 33, his friend Imi Knoebel exhibited 24 Farben—für Blinky at the Galerie Heiner Friedrich in Cologne, Germany. Knoebel and Palermo met in the 1960s as students of Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and, like many of Beuys’s students, both went on to exhibit with Friedrich. Friedrich’s eventual patronage of both artists’ careers through the Dia Art Foundation beginning in the 1970s cemented their reputations in the United States and internationally, and, fittingly, Knoebel’s tribute to his friend is now on display for… Full Review

With the International Polar Year (March 2007–March 2008) and centennial celebrations of the Robert E. Peary and Robert R. Scott expeditions, we are experiencing a new age of polar exploration. The Arctic and Antarctica are now at the center of global concerns about energy and the environment, with visual images—photographs of submersible vessels planting a Russian flag on the North Pole seabed and polar bears floating on ever decreasing ice floes—serving as powerful icons. Contemporary environmental and Native artists have also turned to this region, as documented in two recent exhibitions at the Peabody Essex Museum and the Portland Museum… Full Review

Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions brought to New York City about forty paintings by Nicolas Poussin, along with a group of drawings by the artist and some of his contemporaries, for a superb exhibition devoted to an aspect of his work better known to specialists than the general public.[1] Beautifully paced and hung, the exhibition was large enough to do justice to the subject without being overwhelming. A group of mainly small paintings from Poussin’s early years in Rome filled the first two rooms, and introduced the theme with his first experiments and successes in landscape painting. The visitor could… Full Review

Comparison stands as one of the central foundations of art history. Well before the Wolfllinian model of left and right slides dominated classroom lectures, writers such as Pliny the Elder told stories of comparison and its more worldly iteration, competition between artists. Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of rivalry predominates aesthetic appraisals and theoretical discussions of Italian Renaissance art and artists, giving rise to a critical category referred to as the paragone, or comparison, in which different media, regions, and artists serve as counterpoints. Common dyads in the comparison include painting and sculpture, colore and disegno, Venice and Florence… Full Review

The Saint John's Bible: A Modern Vision through Medieval Methods treated its audience to a journey through a “Bible for the 21st century,” to quote an exhibition wall text. The project is the fruit of a decade-long collaboration undertaken by an international team of master calligraphers and a community of theologians and scholars from Saint John's University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minnesota. This exhibition was the first to place selected pages from the seven-volume Saint John’s Bible within the broader context of the book arts through time and across world cultures. The 22 bifolio openings displayed here, selected from… Full Review

In making art, Jimmie Durham sometimes lets his materials do the sculpting. As Encore tranquillité (2008) reveals, the forces he unleashes from seemingly lifeless objects can be startling. The work features an enormous rock settled atop the smashed halves of a small, single-engine airplane. Originally displayed in an old Russian airfield outside of Berlin, it was relocated to the foyer on the second floor of the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris as the centerpiece of Rejected Stones, a major exhibition of Durham’s “European” works from the past sixteen years. The piece also made an appearance on… Full Review

In his introduction to the catalogue accompanying the exhibition Paint Made Flesh, curator Mark Scala writes that the show seeks to trace a history of “the depicted body as a metaphor for the relationship between self and society as it has changed throughout the decades following World War II” (1). It does so admirably, if incompletely, and without making the recalibrations to larger understandings of postwar painting that seem to be its latent promise. As such, it is an exhibition both wildly pleasurable and quietly frustrating, leaving viewers with the sense that the magnificent group of works is something… Full Review

The exhibition Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT demonstrates a renewed validity for the artist's LED signs, which have long been considered canonical to both contemporary art and feminist discourses. Having made these electronic installations for more than twenty-five years, Holzer seemingly predicted the appearance of the ubiquitous ticker that now streams constantly at the base of television and computer screens. She recognized early on that electronic technology was a crucial site of viewing. The means of delivering information has taken on a whole new significance since the invention of the internet and 9/11. For the exhibition's stop at the Museum of… Full Review

The exhibition The Dragon’s Gift: Sacred Arts of Bhutan features emerging curatorial trends with regard to premodern Asian art, and displays a wealth of treasures from a little-known Himalayan kingdom on the northeastern border of India. Bronze Buddhas, thangkas of wrathful deities, footage of live performance, monks busy at their prayers, Buddhist lineage portraits, and gigantic textiles are just some of the multi-media experiences the show presents. From the only independent Vajrayana Buddhist kingdom in the world—a place where the GHP (Gross Happiness Product) officially replaces the GNP (Gross National Product)—an impressive array of objects from Bhutan are journeying throughout… Full Review

This fall, the battleground states of New Hampshire and Ohio each enlisted an Andy Warhol that was more man than machine and more substance than image to grapple with life and politics at the end of the Bush era. The Warhols on display in Andy Warhol: Pop Politics at the Currier Museum and in Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms at the Wexner Center combine the nuances of mass media with the traditions of graphic arts and painting to delve into personal and public life in the second half of the twentieth century. The Currier exhibition, curated by Sharon Matt… Full Review