Criticism, Art, Essays Anna Gregor Criticism, Art, Essays Anna Gregor

paintings and Paintings

There are paintings, and then there are paintings — I’ll capitalize the latter. Anyone who has Seen a Painting will feel the Truth in this distinction, and anyone who has felt the dissatisfaction of merely seeing a mere painting — and who hasn’t? — will either suspect that such a distinction exists or turn away from the work in front of them in search of meaning elsewhere.

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Criticism, Reviews, Art Grant Tyler Criticism, Reviews, Art Grant Tyler

Denzil Hurley & Brian Sharp at Sebastian Gladstone

The further one surrenders to the compositional dynamics in each work, the more archetypal or elemental they seem to become. They are classically modernist in this sense, distilling form into an essential image, a snapshot of a prototypical aesthetic idea. This seems resonant with the glyph theme in their titling. Juxtapositional interventions — in this case Hurley’s sticks — resolve into a formal irreducibility.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Martin Dornis & Micha Böhme Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Martin Dornis & Micha Böhme

Tradition In Sour Times

The musicians’ interpretation of the song seems to combine tradition and modernity, with the brass band itself representing tradition and the adapted song representing the modern, contemporary. However, the brass orchestras appear oddly out of time, unintentionally comical. They seem to be enacting the funeral of what they represent—the postal service as a state enterprise, tradition, and society before globalization. Yet, for centuries, the postal service symbolized progress, innovation, and renewal.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Steffen Andrae

Making Mute Relations Speak

If the forced collision of dramatic characters and public situations is understood as a metaphor for art, then according to Mailand / Innenhof, art’s role seems to be that of a troublemaker. However, the “theoretical and practical creation of situations,” which echoes a situationist self-understanding, doesn’t only target scientific or political events. It also aims at the so-called cultural sector, and thus at itself.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Patrick Zapien

Terre Verte

…what goes beyond the performance as surplus action becomes the real content of the film, its driving purpose. The actors don’t only play a version of themselves in Olho da Rua, they act at their acting as well and in such a way that the indications of confidence or doubt that flash across their features are never so clear. Is the feeling theirs or another’s? Is it real or feigned for the camera? Do they themselves know?

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Allison Hewitt Ward

On 80064

I do not like 80064. I do not like watching it over and over again for the purpose of this essay. It’s pornographic raw tape of the unmediated real deal. Bullying an old man is a lazy stand-in for the work of art. It would be better to live in in a world in which this video does not exist. But it does.

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Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Tobias Ertl Criticism, Art, Essays, Constellations Tobias Ertl

The Poetics of Disassembly

In Chu’s film, the dismantling becomes a metaphorical operation: it signifies a disassembly of reality into elements—akin to the montage character of film itself. But does this reveal the true reality of social labor? Hardly, because labor resists representation, both in its social function—as a source of surplus value—and in its everyday individual experience.

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Criticism, Art, Essays Arnold Klein Criticism, Art, Essays Arnold Klein

Have You Ever…

That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.

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Criticism, Reviews, Art Leonie Ettinger Criticism, Reviews, Art Leonie Ettinger

Rewriting Nora: Ibsen, Gender, and the Struggle for Self-Determination

“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).

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Criticism, Reviews, Art Anna Gregor Criticism, Reviews, Art Anna Gregor

Raoul de Keyser: The Dialectical Freedom of Painting

Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.

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Criticism, Essays, Art C. Philip Mills Criticism, Essays, Art C. Philip Mills

Two Photos

There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?

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Criticism, Art, Essays Patrick Zapien Criticism, Art, Essays Patrick Zapien

Forgetting What You Know

My entry into art was haphazard. Beyond the general presence of images of art in my home (reproductions of Gauguin, Matisse, and Picasso) and now-forgotten visits to museums at an early age, my first real encounters with art occurred at the movie theater, to which my parents would take me often . . .

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