Riot Material

Art. Word. Thought.

Maria Lassnig: The Paris Years, 1960–68

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at Petzel Gallery, New York City
Reviewed by James Quandt

Maria Lassnig: Film Works
edited by Eszter Kondor, Michael Loebenstein, Peter Pakesch, and Hans Werner Poschauko
FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen, 189 pp., $35.00
NYRB

Many female artists — most recently Carmen Herrera, Faith Ringgold, and Lorraine O’Grady — have had to wait a lifetime to be accorded the recognition of a major museum retrospective. The Austrian painter and filmmaker Maria Lassnig abided many decades of curatorial slights and oversights before being granted one at the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2008, six years before her death at the age of ninety-four. Astonished by the revelation of Lassnig’s extreme paintings, with their sometimes bilious palettes and gleeful emphasis on aged, corpulent, and deliquescing flesh, The Guardian’s reviewer, Laura Cumming, proclaimed, “Maria Lassnig is the discovery of the year—of the century.” [Read more…]

Marcellina Akpojotor’s Sublime Matriarchy

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Daughters of Esan at Rele Gallery, Los Angeles (through 4 December 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Marcellina Akpojotor’s second solo exhibition, Daughters of Esan, continues her exploration into notions of personal intimacy, drawing on her own relationships with her family and the tremendously powerful and transformational possibilities of education and love. Inspired by her great-grandmother’s impassioned commitment to learning and to literacy specifically, Akpojotor has fashioned a series of deeply intimate portraits that insist on knowledge as an essential means of crafting an individual’s sense of self and how to operate within the greater world at large. [Read more…]

Fear and Self-Loathing in Rachael Tarravechia’s Wish You Were Here

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at Launch F18, NYC (through 4 December 2021)
by Danielle Dewar

The horror genre is rooted in a desire for catharsis by means of dispelling fears and anxieties that live deep within a subconscious mind. Since we often crave a controlled release of such emotions, the use of the macabre within an artist’s practice allows for a quick glimpse into a unique psyche while highlighting our collective societal fears. Brooklyn-based artist Rachael Tarravechia delivers just that in her new, exciting body of work currently on view at Launch F18 in Manhattan. [Read more…]

Histories Disembowled in Umar Rashid’s En Garde/On God

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at Blum and Poe, Los Angeles (through 18 December 2021)
Reviewed by Ellen C. Caldwell

In En Garde/On God, Blum & Poe showcases the work of artist Umar Rashid (also known by the pen name Frohawk Two Feathers). Featuring thirteen large paintings and one sculpture in Rashid’s hallmark style, the exhibition highlights works that are bold in both color and story, backed by lengthy titles which are equally vivid and emotive in their humor and wit. Using his imagined “Frenglish Empire” as key players in a revisionist history, Rashid uses biting humor to question, underline, and undermine contemporary and historical issues around the construction of race and class, the perpetual cycle of colonial violence, the historical erasure and survivance of Los Angeles’ Tongva and Chumash people, and the legacies of imperialism that haunt the present and future. Building on a practice of about 18 years, En Garde/On God moves Rashid’s work into decidedly new territory. [Read more…]

Beyond the Pleasure Dome: The Lost Occult World of Burt Shonberg

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at Buckland Museum, Cleveland (through 1 November 2021). Presented by Stephen Romano Gallery, Brooklyn

by Robin Scher

“The truth is out there,” that quintessentially quotable tagline from the hit 90s TV series The X Files, reflects an ongoing fascination. The obsession with this statement lies in its absolute nature: the truth, not a truth. This idea speaks to an objective reality, a place that lies beyond our subjective perceptions and experiences of the world. The paths toward reaching this destination take many forms, encompassing spiritual practices, creative expression and psychonautical exploration. And while the combination of these pursuits was once the remit of counterculture, today they could not be more interconnected and mainstream. To know why is interesting unto itself, but let’s look beyond that to the more curious nature of this recurring curiosity. [Read more…]

The Liquidity of Ourselves: Amoako Boafo’s Singular Duality: Me Can Make We

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at Roberts Projects, Los Angeles (through November 6, 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

Amoako Boafo’s second exhibition at Roberts Projects, Singular Duality: Me Can Make We, represents an exploration into personal identity and the dualities that comprise and shape our human existence. On the surface, this exhibition both examines and celebrates the theme of Blackness, as each image is suggestive of empowerment and individuality. Yet upon deeper reflection, we see the artist pushing the limits of materiality and content in new and exciting ways. The result is a powerful and persuasive body of work, one which serves as a compelling visual testament to the beauty of the Black experience. [Read more…]

Restless Threads: The Tapestries of Annette Cords

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Reviewed by Jill Conner
at Project:ARTspace, New York City
.
When Shape/Shifters opened on January 7, 2020 at Project:ARTspace in Manhattan, no one was remotely ready for something as dramatic as the Covid-19 pandemic, despite the reports that had been circulating out of China. The opening reception was packed and stood as a strong validation of Cords’ new Jacquard tapestries, which simultaneously embraced and reflected the fast-paced nature of New York City. Even though this curatorial collaboration between myself and the artist closed on February 20, 2020, the unexpected shutdown that occurred nearly two weeks later, ceased all potential conversations about this innovative project. The walkable city had been brought to an abrupt halt, and the regular conduits of communication were distorted. And yet, despite the new era of lockdowns and self-quarantine, her work remains key to an objective, city-based adaptation.

[Read more…]

Recalibrating Awareness in Rebecca Campbell Infinite Density, Infinite Light

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At LA Louver (through 2 July 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

How does an artist adequately describe in paint the concept of love? One could say that even the idea of attempting to capture this ineffable human attribute seems schmaltzy and somehow embarrassing, yet most of us have at some point or other lived and died by the sword of passion- jilted, exalted, or both simultaneously. Each person’s personal history is also the history of humanity in that within each life’s unique and spectacular set of personal associations, images, affinities and biases, there also exists a common thread of communion, of universal likeness and of love. We all want it. We all have lost it. We all somehow find it again, and if we don’t, our lives speak endlessly to the pain of this loss. [Read more…]

Aidan Salakhova’s The Dust Became The Breath

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at Gazelli Art House, London (through 6 June 2021)
Reviewed by Niccy Hallifax

Walking into a London gallery again after a year of restrictions and lock-downs was strange but uplifting for the soul. More uplifting still was seeing an artist I have long admired, ever since I saw her work at the Saatchi gallery many years before. The Dust Became The Breath, at Gazelli Art House, is a solo exhibition for Aidan Salakhova, the prominent Azeri artist. [Read more…]

Ferrari Sheppard: Positions of Power

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At UTA Artist Space, Los Angeles (through 15 May 2021)
Reviewed by Eve Wood

The history of portrait painting is long and star-studded from the stunningly humanist portraits of Alice Neel to the politically charged monolithic works of Kehinde Wiley; artists have, for centuries, endeavored to capture the essence of their times and the people who mattered through the lens of figuration. Ferrari Sheppard, like so many artists before him, has created a visual mapping of his life that includes not only friends and family but also artists like Tupac Shakur, Jimi Hendrix and other artists in the Black community whose works have affected him. These paintings suggest less a topography of place and time and more a personal lexicon of strength, love and friendship in the face of injustice. [Read more…]

Museum of Injury: Musings on the New MoMA

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by Allyn Aglaïa Aumand

In New York, briefly at the beginning of the year, I stayed at the home of friends: a documentary filmmaker and a photographer, both from Italy. Another friend, a former farmer turned urbanist and dancer came by the house for tea. She marveled at the space, which had an aesthetic completely distinct from her own. “There are so many ways to be in the world,” she said. She had an energy of admiration, and also liberation, tinged with a small sense of why didn’t anyone tell me? “The more I see other ways of being, the more free I feel to live however I choose,” she said. [Read more…]

Simphiwe Ndzube’s Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon

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at Nicodim Gallery, Los Angeles (through 20 March 2021)
Reviewed by Nancy Kay Turner

God is beginning to resemble not a ruler but the last fading smile of a Cheshire cat.
–Julian Huxley

I will eat the last signs of my weakness
Remove the scars of old childhood wars
and dare to enter the forest whistling
like a snake that had fed the chameleon
–“Solstice,” Audre Lorde

Simphiwe Ndzube’s engaging exhibit, entitled Like the Snake that Fed the Chameleon at Nicodim Gallery, is a visual and aural treat composed of paintings, sculptures and two installations, all bathed in a soundscape created by the artist in collaboration with Thabo K. Makgolo and Zambini Makwetha. A master storyteller, Nzdube creates an existential, otherworldly space where the ordinary becomes extraordinary. The work defies easy explanations, as mystery is piled on top of enigma. Each painting or sculpture shares a homemade, do-it-yourself aesthetic, with all seams made visible, as though haphazardly sewn, stitched, stapled, glued and pinned together in a hurry. All collaged elements are intentionally separate and noticeable, like a homey piecework crazy quilt. Ndzube juggles fact and fiction, the real and the imagined, with a skill and dexterity of a trained magician while employing inventive improvisation like a superb jazz musician. [Read more…]

Portals for Memory, and Wonder, in the Work of Reggie Burrows Hodges

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at Karma Gallery, NYC
Reviewed by Hilton Als
NYRB

Reggie Burrows Hodges begins by painting a raw canvas black. Then he paints his figures and their atmosphere on top of that. His hand is everywhere in his work, in control but not controlling. Shall we call Hodges’s work controlled bleeding? While Color Field painters such as Helen Frankenthaler, Morris Louis, and the like managed their paint by splashing color here and there, their project was different from Hodges’s in a number of ways, including their use of color. While today we look on those distinguished Color Field paintings for the joy they express about physicality, the irrepressible eye, and a relative lack of fear when it comes to the decorative, there are, in these artists’ wonderfully gestural work, some shortcomings. Such as their use, or lack of use, of the color black, a hue that is of the utmost importance to Hodges, who has said: “I start with a black ground [as a way] of dealing with blackness’s totality. I’m painting an environment in which the figures emerge from negative space….If you see my paintings in person, you’ll look at the depth.” [Read more…]

In Conversation: Andrej Dubravsky and Sam Trioli

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Andrej Dubravsky, Aggressive Slav + Friendly Slav, at LAUNCH F18, NYC
by Sam Trioli

Andrej Dubravsky speaks to Sam Trioli about his new paintings for his current dual exhibition at LAUNCH F18, Aggressive Slav and  Friendly Slav. Created from his countryside home in rural Slovakia, Andrej shares the effects on his work and life with returning to nature.

SAM TRIOLI: This exhibition highlights a new series of paintings for you. How did the Aggressive Slav/Friendly Slav series first begin?

ANDREJ DUBRAVSKY: I don’t even know if it’s a particular “series” with an exact start and end, to be honest. I just keep working all year long on various subjects in parallel, no matter if there’s any show coming up next month or in the next six months. Sometime before the works had to be shipped to New York City, I lined up many paintings outside in my garden and I picked from all of these paintings and sort of curated them in a way that would make a sense. This show makes it my first solo show in New York City.  [Read more…]

For Our Dyings: Shirin Neshat’s Land of Dreams and The Colony

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by Lisa Zeiger

“All I can see is the frame.”
–Robert Mitchum in Jacques Tourneur’s Out of the Past

The art of Shirin Neshat is the pure, clear pool at the heart of a Persian garden. On its surface play fountains of poetry and music, films and visions. In its depths reside all the sequestered emotion, alluring ritual, and ambivalent traditions of the artist’s native Iran. Long gone from another country, Neshat exalts its beauty in the photographs, video installations and feature films she has been making since the early 1990s. To paraphrase Henry James, she is someone on whom nothing is lost, least of all the lessons and losses of her own life, in particular the chasm of her exile from Iran. [Read more…]

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle

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at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NYC (ended 1 November 2020)
Reviewed by Sanford Schwartz

Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle
an exhibition at the Birmingham Museum of Art,
November 20, 2020–February 7, 2021;
the Seattle Art Museum,
February 25–May 23, 2021;
and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.,
June 26–September 19, 2021.
Catalog of the exhibition edited
by Elizabeth Hutton Turner and Austen Barron Bailly.
Peabody Essex Museum/University of Washington Press,
188 pp., $45.00
NYRB

As we were waiting on line at the Metropolitan Museum to get into the exhibition Jacob Lawrence: The American Struggle, I told my friend that one reason why Lawrence, though long an esteemed name in American art, has a rather modest presence in our museums may derive from his not having made oil paintings. In a long career that stretched from the late 1930s, when he was barely in his twenties, through the late 1990s—he died in 2000, at eighty-two—he primarily used gouache (which is sometimes referred to as poster paint) or tempera. [Read more…]

Lettering The Yet Known: The Arcane Calligraphs of David D. Oquendo

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by Lisa Zeiger

“I dream of a new alphabet.”  — Marcel Broodthaers, 1974

When considering the merit of a work of art, should the biography of its maker matter? Should we train the tentacles of personality upon the armature of art? When I first saw images of David D. Oquendo’s calligraphic paintings on Instagram (@monkpuppy) I had no ideas about the age, identity or ethnicity of their maker. The paintings were all sign rather than signature, solemn instances of regal yet anonymous beauty, not unlike that of many hieroglyphic writings made in ancient Egypt. Such was the imposing presence of these unfamiliar letters that, while I wondered if they conveyed a meaning, I didn’t care. As I would later learn, a friend of Oquendo’s told him, “You have not created a language, but language.” [Read more…]

Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art

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at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC (through 31 January 2021)
Reviewed by Anna Shapiro
NYRB

The Whitney’s show, Vida Americana: Mexican Muralists Remake American Art, is a study in revisionism, recasting the standard story so that those formerly disregarded and excluded from the canon of modern American art are instead given a place in it. Exhibitions in recent years have been doing that rewriting in accord with values newly freed from stigma, discovering or rediscovering artists who are female or non-European-American, or who simply didn’t fit the strictures of formalist Modernism. The artists in this show, however, were truly avant-garde in their social values, championing the underdogs of history when it was deeply unfashionable to do so. [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…]