Irena Jurek: When I look at your work I think about how it’s in dialogue with ancient ideas and the origins of abstraction. Kandinsky is often accredited with having invented abstraction, but it’s existed for so much longer than that. Evie Falci: If you look at Paleolithic art, it’s filled with spirals and dot work, […]

Who needs Banksy when you have Zansky as a natural resource?  His fire drawings now on view at Stefen Stux are a remarkable mix of skill and innovation. These large scale line drawings have the look of faded sepia sketches of Da Vinci or badly faded enlarged photocopies of twentieth century cave paintings. Upon closer […]

The Ferner-paintings, which Helmut Federle painted in 2012 and 2013, are restrained and quiet, and yet they radiate a determining power. They evade one’s view and, because of this, create an optical vortex. All of the paintings are the same size, only 50 cm high, and show only one form: a circle. The blurred borderline […]

Superman is different than most Super Heroes. His disguise is Clark Kent. He was born Superman. Where Bruce Wayne’s disguise is Batman. Alter egos occur in Pop Culture too. Take Prince, David Bowie, Hanna Montana/Miley Cyrus or Kool Keith. Japanese printmakers would change their names mid-career to create a fresh buzz. Authors too. Isaac Asimov […]

Indian artist Raqib Shaw’s monumental exhibition Paradise Lost at Pace Gallery, New York, of large meticulously painted fabulations rendered like an overlay of inlaid mosaic tiles is exhilarating beyond belief.  The viewer is drawn at once to its spellbinding craftsmanship and exuberance, and the everlasting lure of decadence. But in fact Shaw delivers quite the […]

In the contemporary art world, one of the most challenging undertakings is to curate a group show. Featuring the recent works of six artists of diverse backgrounds, the current exhibition at Hansel and Gretel Picture Garden asks bold questions. Is the centuries-old quarrel between painting and sculpture still relevant and how can an artist complicate […]

Like sugar induced hyper-active children, David and I went to the only place where grownups ring doorbells to see art: The Upper East Side. Were we tricked? Yes. Were we treated, yeah, that too. Our first stop was Michael Werner Gallery where their new and stunning second floor space houses a Peter Saul exhibition. This […]

The new Meridian exhibition at the recently launched Tryon St Gallery, (just a stone’s throw from London’s Saatchi gallery), explores the universal human fascination with finding our place in the world and recording it through maps and mapping. Attesting a human need to determine and record one’s position in the world, maps—and intangible concepts such as meridians—are instrumental in […]

Mechelen is a small city in Belgium, poised exactly half way between Brussels and Antwerp. Though it has a higher percentage of listed buildings than the better-known tourist magnet Bruges, for a long time, the city has been a hidden gem. Over the last couple of years, however, Mechelen has managed to put itself on […]

As a repository of Dadaist ideas, the brilliant show at Blain/Di Donna, Dada and Surrealist Objects, represents what constitutes artistic re-interpretation. It brings back into focus the bankruptcy of contemporary artistic initiatives as nothing more than  shameless re-invention.  The “objects” in this elegantly-mounted show represent imaginative artifacts created between 1920 and 1969 (save for the […]