A recent Facebook comment on the artistic validity of a social practice project made a snarky case that war could too be considered art, due to its impact and sublime scale. If one took up this misguided thought experiment, then an elaborating context could be the rhetoric of Italian Futurists. As they posited, the tools […]

Some meaningful statements on painting are being made in Boston this fall. At the Institute of Contemporary Art is Expanding the Field of Painting, highlighting works from the ICA collection that challenge the orthodoxy of traditional materials, subjects, and techniques of the genre. While challenging the orthodoxy of painting’s, well, everything has been going on […]

Showcasing four artists who hail from four different countries; Belgium, The Netherlands, The United States, and France, Backslash Gallery has put together a cohesive show of artists working in similar veins but from different parts of the globe. These artists use codes and forms centring on the theme of construction and deconstruction. Populating the gallery […]

In New York City at the Museum of Modern Art you are standing before“The Treachery of Images” (1929). It is a painting of a single object, a pipe, under which are the words, “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” (This is not a pipe.) Why the denial? Of course, this may be a pipe but the […]

Flesh and Bone pits a happily married establishment figure and Royal College of Art tutor, against a self-taught sadomasochistic gambler with a fondness for alcohol and the sleek underbelly of Soho. It is difficult not to see this exhibition as a competition of interests and the interesting; the very personalities of both artists are quite evident—one only needs […]

Parody and irony entertainingly put what is narrated at a distance. Which of these two rhetorical devices does Judith Hopf employ, when she places a flock of eight sheep appearing to gaze at the entering visitors in the main gallery space? All of these sheep, whose caricature-like faces are hand-drawn, seem to have been made […]

Imagine this show as candy for the eye and, for those who quiver at the sight of the surrealist distortion of bodies, queasiness in the stomach. Hiroshima-born Akikazu Iwamoto, now forty, fills his compact solo show at Stux Gallery with wildly imaginative, candy-colored paintings and drawings that involve amusing and sometimes frightening bodily transformations. The […]

Whitecross Street in east London is just a memory stick’s throw from an area that has recently been dubbed the “silicon roundabout” for playing host to a growing coterie of tech companies. However one fine, late-summer afternoon all of that humming immaterial labor looked awfully anaemic in proximity as a crane-equipped flatbed truck unloaded 25 […]

The first thing that strikes you upon entering this multi-faceted show by David Renggli (b. 1974 in Zurich) at Kunst Halle Sankt Gallen is one of Renggli’s signature reverse glass paintings in black and white titled I Love You (b/w), 2013. Contrary to the usual colorfulness of the abstract color strokes, the hues in this […]

Travel to the edges of any major European city, and you reach placid suburban hell. This is true even for ultra-civilized Copenhagen. The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in the suburb of Humlebæk is reachable in under an hour by train, from which you see the city ebb, flow, and dissipate. Tucked inside an otherwise […]