Playtime, Drawn, & Questions and Answers Playtime—Peabody Essex Museum You know that you’re in Playtime from the squealing emanating from one of Martin Creed’s two pieces in the show, Work No. 329 (2004). The installation, following the artist’s precise instructions to “fill latex balloons with half of the air in a given space […]
GALLERY REVIEWS 2.22.18
Inventur, Culture Hustlers, and Sandrine Schaefer Inventur: Art in Germany, 1943-55—Harvard Art Museums Five years in the making, Inventur examines German artistic production in the decade-plus of recovery after World War II. It takes its name from a Günter Eich poem that describes his meager belongings, including a “precious nail / I keep concealed […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Dana Schutz: Dana Schutz—Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston
Dana Schutz has not yet painted a canvas that didn’t make me wish that I was looking at a Judith Linhares instead. That said, I’m glad I could see any Schutzes at the ICA, which wouldn’t have happened if it were up to some local busybodies bent on punishing her for her abortive Emmett […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Writhe & Resolve: Aspects of Arcadia—Matter & Light
Aristotle Forrester’s churning canvases take an abstract-expressionist attitude to an effort to depict Arcadia, the pastoral vision of harmony that has been a mainstay of the Western imagination since the Renaissance. This is an apt way to go about it in 2017, given that the details of such a place only ever seem to […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Angela A’Court: Thisness—Gallery BOM
Monday Morning—Copyright 2017 Angela A’Court Soft pastel is as close as an artist can get to working with pigment itself, the powder that gives paint its color. It is also regarded unfairly as an amateur’s medium, though the impression is correct in that not many people use it with as much urgency and personal […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Sean Downey: Wholly Idle—Steven Zevitas Gallery
Wholly Idle—Copyright 2017 Steve Downey Sean Downey’s work at Steven Zevitas is dealing with an old problem, that of painting in an age in which painting is an obsolete medium, at least in the respect that there have been easier ways to make images for a century and a half. Downey is digging into […]
GALLERY REVIEW: Robert Richfield: Abridged—Gallery Kayafas
Gouwe Rail Bridge, Gouda, Netherlands 2016—Copyright 2017 Robert Richfield Instilled with a love of mighty bridges as a child in Cincinnati, where five of them cross the Ohio River, Robert Richfield set out to photograph them in all of their horizontal grandeur. Early attempts included multiple exposures of 4×5 negatives, which must have been […]
REORDERING THE RAINBOW
The geographic and stylistic travels of Anya Smolnikova Musa Collective is the result of some ambitious graduates of Boston University’s MFA program from the mid-2000s coming together to operate an alternative space in Allston. Open by appointment only, it is significantly less accessible than your typical Harrison Avenue storefront. I have concerns that the […]
