Brown Blue – Laura Owens @ MOCA, Los Angeles Rosanna Albertini Laura Owens atthe Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, an exhibition of five years of work.The artist is young, fifty seven paintings in the show. They are puzzling, itseems they can’t stand the pressure of our common sense: the more one triesto analyze them, […]

David Shterenberg Selma Stern It is difficultto find an artist of the 20th century who has been more neglected by art historythan the artist David Shterenberg. His works were banned in the 60s and 70s andneither Russian nor foreign art critics were allowed access to Shterenberg`sart works. When the Russian avant-garde was reviewed by art […]

Art / Fashion: Artist’s essay Shun Sasaki I’m tryingto express the primary forms. Fashion presents the work of contemporary art thatuses the highly readable visual language of clothing and appearance. The artists,or designers, use clothing forms to examine issues of identity, particularlygender, and to examine the societal forces that dictate the way we look. We […]

City as Open Book Slawomir Marzec In the late autumn1975 inhabitants of German village Kleinsassen were agitated by sudden message:stranger arrived. The stranger set a tent (which during winter became an igloo)in ruins of monastery and began its reconstruction alone. All sorts of guessesand rumors on his subject circulated in the neighborhood, however nobody supposed,that […]

Andreas Jaeggi “Blue Period” at Gallery Spruetzhuesli in February 2003 Steffan Biffiger Exactly one hundredyears after Picasso, a painter comes along and entitles his exhibition with a wink “Période Bleue”, instead of calling it simply “BluePaintings” or “Paintings In Blue”. Obviously, it is importantto Andreas Jaeggi to call this newest working phase a “period”, theexpression […]

Drawing the Line – Who Cares About Illustration? Thomas Girst It’s rathercurious that in the land of George Grosz and John Heartfield, illustration nevertook hold in newspapers after World War II. Compared to American magazines andpapers, German press publications seldom provide more than a single sketchy drawingas daily artistic political commentary. Oftentimes just it is […]

“Personal Things” Vladimir Sitnikov There is a lot of pop art going on in Moscow at the moment. The exhibition “PersonalThings” was shown in Moscow this year, exposing pop art by one of Russia`smost famous contemporary artists, – Vladimir Sitnikov. Vladimir Sitnikovwas born in 1958 in Moscow and started studying art at the V. Motovilov`s […]

"To Love, Honor and Cherish: The Role of Contemporary Portraiture" Jeanine Jackson A successful portrait, much like a good marriage, is the result of a profound commitment to love, honor and cherish. All quotations and images are included with kind permission of each artist to use in this article or in the NY Arts Magazine […]

The Lyricism of Pure Thought Mark Daniel Cohen Art is the stage upon which the drama of intelligence is enacted. A work of art is a thought — for all the reliance on and enhancements due to skill and dexterity, for all the diffidence typical of artists’ statements of intention, for all their general uncertainty […]

Happy Days – It’s all well and dandy in a disquieting new world Stefano Pasquini Not much has been happening nowadays in contemporary art. At least on this side of the globe. Yet I’m starting to feel a certain disquieting atmosphere in many works of art I experienced in the past few months. Especially from […]