Author Archives: jolanta
Quality Realism
Ondrej Brody and Kristofer Paetau’s work, Painting China Now (2007), is the starting point for their new work, Wang Bin Torture in Commercial Quality, High Quality, and Museum Quality. Painting China Now is a collection of 30 oil paintings depicting violence inflicted by the Chinese government on Falun Dafa members. The paintings were rendered with […]
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger Barbara Kruger @ Guild Hall, August 14- October 11Opening August 14, 2-4pm
A Small Town Scenario
Curiously drawn by the immediate, Michele Bressan has compiled and reared a personal aesthetic in these passing Romanian scenes. In his four years of activity as a photographer he attained a firm and thorough documentation of a barefaced, yet unobserved local life. His pictures may appear frank in their depicting of everyday viewing, but it’s […]
Compulsive Animality
A long time ago, I was an activist. An animal-rights activist. When I went to art school, I failed to convince myself what I was doing with my work was necessary. It can be useful, but it was not necessary. One day I found myself weeping over my images of animals suffering in cages, and I […]
Victorian Excavation
Early in his career, painter Aaron Smith spent his days feeding a studious obsession for art history and his weekend nights manning the door of a L.A. nightclub that hosted appearances by performance artist Ron Athey and others, who were famously photographed by Catherine Opie. Like many artists of his generation, Smith explores issues of […]
Against the Act
I am interested in the ways that—especially gender-specific forms of—power and violence are structured and staged in representations of sexuality and (processes of) desire and queer-feminist (body) politics. In Dolores (2005), a staging of a lesbian-queer new adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Lolita, I constructed a walk-in set. I used wooden markings on the floor […]
Andreas Sell
At a selected point in the exhibition room, either Andreas Sell, himself, or actors hired by him, stand still for hours. This type of exhibition turns the human body into art/the exhibition. The artist uses the act of standing in the exhibition/being the exhibition as a display of his disruption to the traditional experience of […]
The Duchamp Paradigm: Marcel Duchamp– The Art of Chess
…Actually, I believe that every chess player experiences a mixture of two aesthetic pleasures: first the abstract image akin to the poetic idea in writing, second the sensuous pleasure of the ideographic execution of that image on the chessboards. From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion […]
Marcel Duchamp: Étant donné
Two major subjects for Duchampions [sic] are Marcel Duchamp’s final work, Étant donnés: 1. La chute d’eau, 2. Le gaz d’éclairage (Given: 1. The Waterfall, 2. The Illuminating Gas), posthumously revealed to the public in 1969, and Duchamp’s lifelong devotion to chess. Two acutely relevant exhibitions opened within a month of each other early this […]
Engaging Feeling
Fresh from having his work shown at the Florence Biennale, a selection of Dutch artists Wim Zorn’s abstract pieces were recently presented at the Broadway Gallery in NYC. These painted, primordial color-schemed works border on being assemblages by incorporating materials, like bamboo and binding agents to create shape and texture in a mainly asymmetrical style. […]
