(Or Why Dana Schutz’s Painting of Emmett Till Goes Far Beyond Freedom of Expression)
By Paco Barragán
The recent controversy about Dana Schutz’s painting Open Casket (2016) at the Whitney Biennial is reminiscent of similar incidents in the United States that keep popping up with frenzied fury.
In this case, the attack came from [...]
The paintings of Markus Lüpertz present us with doors of possibility, the sheer scale of which begs one to fall in. But you have to approach these works with visceral openness, the way you would approach a new lover. You enter a painter’s world that challenges description beyond Neo-Expressionism, incorporating the classical and [...]
On first glance, the saccharine pop imagery, neon colors and DIY aesthetic of Derek Larson’s mixed-media works seem one more contribution to our instant culture. (The giant, freestanding screen with projected animation that he constructed for the PRAVA festival in Washington, D.C., in 2015, for example, became a crowd favorite as a selfie [...]
By Michele Robecchi
From 1972 to 1981, Jimmie Durham didn’t show any art publicly. This wasn’t due to inertia or lack of inspiration, but to an interest in activism that led him to enroll as a worker in the American Indian Movement (AIM), the Native American human and civil rights advocacy group founded in [...]
“Do we even need architecture anymore?”
Andreas Angelidakis
By Alexandria Pierce
Andreas Angelidakis’s body of work, inspired by the city of Athens, continues to signify the shadow of history and the simulacrum in works like Vessel (2016), which is both a sculpture and an animated video. Humorously, it features a pithos, a [...]
One of the co-founders of the influential ZERO group, Heinz Mack was already making avant-garde art when he and Otto Piene organized the first ZERO art show in 1957. Born in Germany in 1931, Mack attended the art academy in Düsseldorf in the 1950s and also earned a degree in philosophy from the [...]
By Kerr Houston
Clearly, the function of contemporary art critics can be-and has often been-construed in a number of different ways. In his essay Clichés Reach Critical Mass, Take Writers Down Slippery Slope, Blake Gopnik suggests that art critics can write the first draft of art history. Elsewhere, Peter Plagens has suggested that we [...]
By Kim Power
An apple thrown in the air will fall downwards, obeying the laws of gravity. Its velocity will remain constant unless an outside force acts upon it. We rely on predictable laws of motion to navigate our daily world. However, in art, and more specifically in painting, these laws may be suspended, [...]
By Kristina Olson
Like the Lone Biker of the Apocalypse in the Coen brothers’ film Raising Arizona, the first Whitney Biennial in the spacious, Renzo Piano-designed building, while impressive, is hard on the little things. Small-scale works like Matt Browning’s collapsible wood grids and Ulrike Müller’s modest, enamel paintings and works on paper [...]
By Raisa Clavijo
The work of Tomás Ochoa (Cuenca, Ecuador, 1969) carries an implicit, powerful political message. This multidiciplinary artist takes Latin American society and history as essential raw material, analyzing them in light of his knowledge of semiotics, post-structuralist theories and decolonial discourse. His strategy is based on dismantling or deconstructing “official” history, [...]
