Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Marlene Dumas’ Masks of Inborn Gods

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open-end, at Palazzo Grassi, Venice (through 8 January 2023)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Four relatively small artworks greet the visitor in the first room of the Marlene Dumas exhibit, open-end, at Palazzo Grassi. D-rection shows a young man contemplating his rather large and purple erection. A bluish white face and a brown face unite for a kiss in a nearly abstract closeup, Kissed. The subject of a Turkish Girl exhibits her vulva by holding up her legs at an unlikely angle. Finally, in the small loose drawing About Heaven, unidentified objects are flanked by a Dumas poem about death and eroticism. The visitor is warned: the exhibition shows sexually explicit works, contemplates issues of our common humanity such as race, and does not shrink from the esoteric. Anyone seeking a comfortable experience better turn back. [Read more…]

Presence as Abstraction, as Beguiling Obfuscation, in the Works of Leon Kossoff

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Leon Kossoff: A Life in Painting, at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, NYC (with concurrent exhibitions at LA Louver in Los Angeles, through 9 April 2022, and Annely Juda Fine Art in London)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

The first painting greeting us in the Mitchell-Innes & Nash exhibition is, aptly, a self portrait. Smaller than the other pieces in the show, monochromatic, it packs the power of dynamite. The man represented closeup looks aghast, terrified even. His eyes stare down with dismay at something off canvas, an abyss? Hell? Malleable, the face is agitated by a chaos of brushstrokes. The boundaries between the head and its surroundings are unclear, as if everything was made of the same substance: mud. Mud, here, is nicely symbolic not only for its biblical intimation — Man being dipped, thrown, trampled in and yanked from the “miry mud” — but the muddiness of mind is also equally appropriate. While his portraits often halted at an opacity in the sitter, Kossoff had a pretty good idea of what he was about: uncertain about everything. He could, he tells us, hold onto nothing solid, either on the outside or the inside. “The important thing is to somehow keep going. This is ‘the straw to which we cling.” This credo, shared in a rare interview, could serve as caption for all of his mature paintings. [Read more…]

Salman Toor’s How Will I Know and Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

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at Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC: Salmon Toor: How Will I Know (through 4 April 2021) and Vida Americana: Mexican Artists Remake American Art, 1925-1945 (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In two rooms on the ground floor of the Whitney Museum, a scattering of miniature brown men frolic around the walls, choreographed by Pakistani artist Salman Toor. Some dance, some light a cigarette, others whisper. Many do nothing but offer themselves to our gaze or that of their cellphone. Salman Toor, who admits to admiring Watteau and Gainsborough, has adorned his tableaux with a whole festival of baroque imagery: undulant mustaches and hair styles, collars that almost look like lace, a loose neckerchief, a large hat largely out of place. [Read more…]

John Bradford: By Land And By Sea

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at Anna Zorina Gallery, NYC (through 25 April — view this exhibition online at annazorinagallery.com)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“For there is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men.”
— Herman Melville, from Moby Dick

The latest John Bradford exhibit at Zorina Gallery shows works in a style, history painting, that’s been out of favor with the art establishment for many decades. All the paintings’ subjects come from the 19th century or before, and relate to momentous events relating to the USA and the Americas: arrival of the Mayflower, of Columbus, Washington’s revolution, Lincoln’s wars. Bradford’s technique, thick impasto, has also fallen out of favor and is found more often in street market art: think Paris-view at sunset.  What is a blueblood painter, if ever there was one — he is a descendant of William Bradford, the English Puritan separatist who escaped persecution from King James I on the Mayflower and became the longstanding Governor of the Plymouth Colony, known thereafter as the Pilgrim Fathers — doing producing low art? [Read more…]

Maria Lassnig’s Ways of Being

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at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In the self portrait Du oder Ich (You Or Me), Maria Lassnig points one gun at the viewer, the other at herself. Either I kill you or I kill myself, or both. Her face expresses fear, dismay, perhaps disgust, but not aggression. If she shoots at the viewer and her double, the brush-flourishing painter, it’s out of sheer terror. In her 80s, Lassnig depicts herself in the nude, without sparing us any detail of her ageing body. Sagging breasts, folds of flesh, hairless pudenda. The visitor is warned: the works in Maria Lassnig’s retrospective will not shy from brutal truths. We live in angst, in solitude, our bodies decay, we die, or those we love die. Women are subjected to male domination, artists to opportunists and passing trends. These facts of life, of her life, of ours in their universality, are delivered through Lassnig’s very own brand of expressionism: broad strokes, distortion of the body and face, grotesque, symbolism. So why does the work in the exhibition leave an impression of such striking beauty? [Read more…]

The Variant Hands Of Lynette Yiadom-Boakye And Wilmer Wilson IV

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Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, In Lieu of A Louder Love 
at Jack Shainman Gallery, NYC
&
Wilmer Wilson IV, Slim…you don’t got the juice
at Susan Inglett Gallery, NYC (through March 16)

Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Lynette Yiadom-Boakye follows in the steps of late 19th century European masters, and makes no mystery about it. They favored the wet-on-wet application of paint, more poetically known as Alla Prima, that demands quick work in one sitting, or one day. When Dutch painters first invented it in the 1600s, the impossibility to render small, time consuming details such as luxurious fabrics and jewels, veered the focus to the sitter’s interior life. Instead of stressing status (rich, powerful, respectable), the protestant artists questioned what it means to be a human being. Manet reintroduced it to his followers in the late 19th century by using the technique to great effect. His work is also instantly recognizable for its deep, unctuous blacks. [Read more…]

Bodies, And Limits, Beyond The Norm In Touch Me Not

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Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

At the start of Touch Me Not, which opened the 2018 Romanian Film Festival in New York City, two men set up a device involving a glass plate and a camera. This is followed by a panning shot in shallow focus detailing the landscape of a male body, skin, hair, follicles, moles. The movement of the camera and its focus are perfectly controlled: light floods the body evenly, leaving no shadows, resulting in a flat objectivity with no physical feature being favored over another. The blurred face of Adina Pintilie, the director of Touch Me Not, appears on the glass plate. She is talking to someone about the film, questioning their relationship: “Why did you not ask me about the film? Or was it me being relieved you don’t ask?” A disembodied woman’s voice replies. The camera turns to reveal, Laura, who is played by Laura Benson, or who is Laura Benson. A svelte woman in her 50s with a mane of dark hair, the seasoned English actor has worked with Patrice Chéreau and other directors known for their exploratory approach to drama. [Read more…]

In Paris: 1,2,3 Data Group Show; Suter’s Radial Grammar; and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains

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Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

1,2,3 Data group show, Batia Suter’s Radial Grammar, and VHILS’ Fragments Urbains are three exhibitions of contemporary art taking place in Paris this season. While they vary greatly in form and content, they all use found materials as the source for their art and address the relationship of humans to their environment, both natural and manmade.

VHILS, Fragments Urbains (19 May – 29 June 2018)
at Centre Centquatre, Paris

The Portuguese artist Alexandre Farto, who goes by the street tag VHILS (his favorite letters to spray as a teenager), came to fame for his street art first in his native Seixal, and then in a number of metropolises around the world. He created images by stripping, tearing, scratching through layers of posters on billboards, in what he calls an archeological process. [Read more…]

Immersive Forays Into Klimt, Schiele and Hundertwasser

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at Atelier des Lumières, Paris (through 11 November 2018)
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Friedensreich Hundertwasser

Imagine entering a large raw space plunged in darkness. A few structures barely emerge out of the gloom, adding complexity to the basic box: a cube, a rectangular cuboid, and a cylinder. Images start fading in or flaring up on theblack surfaces. Hugely enlarged photographs of people, buildings, bridges, paintings by super famous artists such as Van Gogh and Picasso and Michelangelo fill sequentially the vertical planes. Decorative or architectural elements from every period — balustrades, cornices, columns, metal arches, clockworks are projected on the smaller structures and on the floor. The photographic or graphic elements or details from the paintings duplicate, triplicate, multiply, creating a rhythmic composition. Blown-up out of all proportions, they are then shrunk back to flash, strobe, fade-out, zoom-by at high speed, making it all the more surprising that warnings for epileptics are not issued at the entrance. The experience is not unlike standing at Times Square at night, but the honks of the city are replaced by a classical music track, and fewer people mull around gaping at the bright spectacle. In fact, there is no need to even move, as the show takes place all around, and people do sit or even lie down. [Read more…]

Manifesta 12 Promises The World, And Delivers

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by Arabella Hutter von Arx

“I have pushed for the transformation of Manifesta . . . into a more inclusive, pragmatic and sustainable format that turns signals into substance.” – Hedwig Fijen, founding director of Manifesta

1. Opening Rites To Our Common Humanity

Buzz words fly around at the press conference launching Manifesta 12 in the breathtaking Renaissance Church of Santa Caterina: incubator, civic cooperation, testing ground, sustainability, interconnection, flowing networks. The 12th edition of the biennial took as guiding vision the “Planetary Garden,” a term coined by French gardening philosopher Gilles Clément. They add that Manifesta, the nomadic biennial, was created in the early 90s as a response to the erection of new partitions and borders in Europe after they had been felled in the previous decade. Manifesta 12 wants to shift perspectives, in order to imagine and promote caring for the world through collaboration, the second tier of its title, “Cultivating Coexistence.” This “cultivating,” a gardening of sorts, is to replace the existing paradigm of one species’ domination at all cost. The concept of cultivation is to be applied to the city of Palermo itself, with the ambition of bringing lasting change and empowering its citizens of all origins and classes. [Read more…]

Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer

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at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

While individual galleries throughout this fine exhibition at The Met lie hushed in low-light to preserve these truly masterful drawings—their nuanced hatchings, their delicate shadings, their refined, ephemeral colorings—the pièce de résistance of Michelangelo: Divine Draftsman and Designer will stun the visitor: The Sistine chapel’s ceiling frescos projected on an upside down screen. The flawless, backlit surfaces convey most effectively the colossal composition, and reproduce with accuracy the gaudiness of the original. This technological marvel might be perceived as preposterous by the more discerning modern visitor, but is likely to have been applauded by Michelangelo and the public of the Renaissance.  [Read more…]

The Redemption Of Art Through Disfigurement And Slaughter

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Kara Walker
at Sikkema Jenkins & Co, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

A black lascivious baby bandaging the head of a wounded soldier, possibly confederate. A white man walking while giving (or imposing) cunnilingus to a black hydrocephalic woman. Fredric Douglass. OJ Simpson. A composite of Peter Tosh and the Baron Samedi holding Trump’s head. Salome offering Trayvon Martin’s severed head on her tray, while a missionary with a voluptuous backside admonishes her. A Ku Klux Klan member hiding Trump under his skirts. An 18th century libertine masturbating. Batman stealing a mummy topped with a black head. [Read more…]

Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo

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at the Brooklyn Museum of Art until January 7, 2018
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

 While it has long been traditional to show artists together when they belong to the same art movement, such as fauvists or expressionists, exhibitions with fairly unrelated artists seem to be the latest rage with curators. Monet, Hodler, and Munch, who were featured in a joint exhibition at the Marmottan Monet Museum in Paris earlier this year, overlapped chronologically over one century (1840-1944), but are classified respectively with impressionism, postimpressionism and symbolism. The Musée d’Art Moderne is currently showing together Derain, a fauvist, Balthus a neoclassicist, and Giacometti, usually classified as an existentialist sculptor. The work of Mapplethorpe was recently displayed on the walls surrounding Rodin’s sculptures at the Rodin Museum. [Read more…]

Art/Afrique: Le Nouvel Atelier

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Les Initiés (The Insiders)
A Selection of Works (1989-2009) from the Jean Pigozzi Collection of African Art
at The Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Works by artists from South of the Sahara are being exhibited at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris, one of three exhibitions of African art. The building, a folly Frank Gehry has indulged in his advancing years, reportedly cost just under 900 million dollars, while less than a decade earlier his Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao cost a comparatively scant $100 million.

The works are part of a collection that curator André Magnin has put together on behalf of Jean Pigozzi, an art collector and heir to the Simca automobile brand. Pigozzi owns yachts and islands and admits, quite unabashedly, he has never set foot on the African continent and doesn’t plan to. Despite this rather paradoxical setup, the art — vibrant, expressive, masterly — silences any misgivings about the contradictions between art market and free expression, about the morality of exiling these works from their native audience, about the appropriateness of an “African Art” label and, finally, about the subjectivity of a Western critic’s review. [Read more…]

Florine Stettheimer: Painting Poetry

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at the Jewish Museum, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

In 1916, when Florine Stettheimer was 45 and had been painting for over 20 years, she had her first solo show at the Knoedler Gallery in New York. Half way through the show, she wrote in her diary: “I am not selling much to my amazement.” And, at the end, “Nothing sold.” She did not get the recognition she expected as an artist through the sale of her paintings. Reviews were derisive or indifferent at best. It must have hurt. Had her paintings sold, she would have joined the ranks of painters such as O’Keeffe and Aaron Douglas and Arthur Dove and Gaston Lachaise, her Modernist friends who lived from their art. Instead, she was denied an escape from her position as an upper class idler. From then on, she refused all solo shows. She embraced brazenly her identity as upper class, at least publicly. She overpriced her paintings to prevent any sales. [Read more…]

Making Space: Women Artists And Postwar Abstraction

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at Museum of Modern Art, NYC
Reviewed by Arabella Hutter von Arx

I have a vested interest in finding whether essential differences exist between the art of women and that of men. A woman, I’ve been doing, appreciating, thinking about art all my life. Questions assail me as I approach the MOMA exhibition Making Space: Women Artists and Postwar Abstraction. Is their work different from their male counterparts? If it is different, in what way? Is their art worse, justifying the relative obscurity they have been left in? Is there a unifying quality to the work, or is the collection of individualities more defining than the elusive gender? [Read more…]

When The Imaginary Reader Gets Real

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by Arabella Hutter von Arx

Exploring the writer-reader relationship, whether real or imaginary

“I know it’s happenin’, but who is it happenin’ to? I know it’s happenin’, but who is it happenin’ to? What am I gonna do to wake up? ” cries Kate Tempest, the UK wunderkind, into an imaginary cellphone.  On the largest stage of the Jaipur Literature Festival 2017, she is performing her work Let Them Eat Chaos, part one- woman play, part rap, part poetry. Gutsy, gusty, genuine, she paints with brilliance and poignancy the world of anguished young Brits: “He can’t tell, he can’t dream, he can’t feel, he can’t scream … And he thinks, Is this really what it means to be alive?” But the packed audience of young Indian people knows without the shadow of a doubt who it is happening to and what it means to be alive: they feel only too urgently their desire for a better life, a better India. Still, they clearly appreciate the passionate lament, and with open minds try to understand the strange, frumpy woman plodding the stage. [Read more…]