Chicago-based painter and sculptor Himmelfarb’s recent projects consist of drawing, painting and assembling trucks–both toy-sized sculptures and actual vintage pickups loaded with an assortment of rusted objects and found detritus. His works are a kind of history on wheels, sojourners in time. And Venice, with its pronounced absence of cars–and wheels in general–proved an interesting place to uncover the essence of our attachment to motion and John’s current interests.
Read MoreCulture workers–artists, curators, museums, galleries, and even collectors–will need to choose their weapons well at this highly charged cultural crossroads. Will a paintbrush, pencil, theater, soup kitchen, computer, parade, YouTube, or even cash suffice to forge meaningful change? My guess is the means of engagement will inevitably evolve to match the challenge, but that won’t include simply “liking” a picture of a naked and pregnant Trump in the arms of Vladimir Putin.
Read MoreThe absurdities that Magritte quietly broadcast are possible in this and any universe; meaning, one realizes, is ultimately in flux. But Berger and Magritte charge the viewer with the responsibility of working out the real, and ultimately that which is critical and consequential. How to do that, how to decode reality? Perhaps only with our greatest tool and its full arsenal of flavors: language. Language, which got us in trouble to begin with.
Read MoreIn 1948, The New Yorker published a story about idyllic small town America where everyone knows everyone’s name. Each year those names are placed into a box and townspeople gather as one name is retrieved and the owner of that name is then publicly stoned to death. The story is The Lottery, and it remains Shirley Jackson’s masterpiece.
Read MoreVoirin, who has long photographed herself and her body, presents herself in a quiet fit of honesty. She is any woman becoming something else, someone else. It is hard not to study the process and invade her privacy. It is an intimate and public act, but a gratuitous one. It is however, an available, accessible one.
Read MoreThis past year, Jamie Newton has been making ephemeral sculptures, captured solely in photographs which are then uploaded to his Instagram account, concretewheels. His project is a year-long visual poetic diary of constructions created from nature’s golden crumbs.
Read MoreSylvie Franquet’s reMembering is nothing less than a treatise on how art history has plundered the female form and women’s idle hands. Franquet’s intimate, reconfigured tapestries now on view at London’s October Gallery recall my own mother’s needlepoints of tulips and roses, little girls and blue skies–laborious forays into home decoration. Well made, but uninteresting–a condescending opinion of mine, I admit, that haunts me today. Indeed, I once asked my mother to produce a pair of text works; she acquiesced, but grudgingly, complaining, “I don’t like your conceptual works! How about a nice flower!”
Read MoreWalking the aisles I was soon drawn to the Fluxus-like work, Dé, Joue ou Perdes (2015) by French conceptualist Claude Closky. A limited edition box work by the art publisher We Do Not Work Alone, is simple and wonderfully insane. It is also a metaphor in so many ways for what was echoing in my mind: A single die, with five of its six sides commanding: JOUEZ (play) and one, signaling: PERDU (lost). A restless game without end.
Read MoreBlake reminds us of the artist’s métier with his wide-ranging endeavors–that the work is lifelong, the endeavor is serious and results are surprising reflections of what we’ve buried in our lives, our homes and our collective unconscious.
Read MoreIn the cut and paste art world, perhaps the single most influential artist was the German Kurt Schwitters. Galerie Zlotowski, a small Rive Gauche gallery, has brought together 13 small collage and assemblage works, dating from 1918 through 1947, that offer a range of Schwitters’ poetic investigations.
Read MoreIn London for a week of art hopping and beer tasting, I found myself in one of my favorite galleries that combines both–The approach. This sleek contemporary space not only exhibits one of my favorite collage artists–John Stezaker–but also sits above a warm and friendly pub just off the Bethnal Green Tube station in East London.
Read MoreWhen Jean Tinguely unpacked his “Hommage to New York” in 1960 and turned it on in the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Sculpture Garden at the Museum of Modern Art on March 17, 1960, the sculpture did more than self destruct–it exploded, caught fire, and was drowned by the New York Fire Department. But art history was made amid the shattering bottles, smoke spumes, and firey blow up. Tinguely had brought his kinetic junk to the world of art and succeeded in spectacular failure.
Read More“Plume of Desire,” a series of black and white lithographs drawn in Los Angeles and Paris but printed at ITEM in Paris, is something of a children’s book for very, very bad children. More than 30 pieces, each 60 x 60 cm, filled the ITEM’s gallery in Paris. These prints are dark, beautiful, and hilarious and typical of the creator of Eraserhead and Lost Highway.
Read MoreJonathan Monaghan, the New York-based artist, exhibited his series of digital collages that mix Manhattan architecture with 5th Avenue luxury sofas, divans, and love seats in a questioning survey of our cities and sense of reality. At his exhibition at the beautiful gallery 22,48 m2 in Paris, Monaghan seeks to literally open a window on the myth of our cities, the notion of luxury and the dreamscape of our fantasy, echoing the sense of longing and mystery Italo Calvino speaks of in his Invisible Cities.
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Support for Artblog has been provided by The Philadelphia Cultural Fund.