Reviews
The Big Picture: Cai Guo Qiang at the Taipei Fine Arts Museum
By Alvaro Rodríguez-Fominaya
You cannot help feeling overwhelmed once you enter the lobby of Taipei Fine Arts Museum, an imposing 1980s modernist building reminiscent of the Smithsons. Cai Guo Qiang’s transformation of the museum space has brought large crowds of wandering visitors that replicate the shopping mall experience as a cultural subproduct of the 1990s. This [...]
Steve Schepens - Horror 14.2
Plataforma Revolver and Clube Portugeis Artes e Ideias - Lisbon, Portugal
By Carla Acevedo-Yates
When we think of horror, we usually think of a genre of film where, as viewers, we are faced with a terrifying situation that anticipates impending danger, relying on our fears and guilt to build tension. For Berlin-based artist Steve Schepens, in his [...]
Kilian Rüthemann
Museum für Gegenwartskunst - Basel, Switzerland
By Oliver Kielmayer
The prudish soberness of Kilian Rüthemann’s (*1979) work fits perfectly well into the current reductionist trend of contemporary art; this is not, however, the result of any strategic calculation, but derives from a sincere interest in the workability of simple materials. Also there is the biographical peculiarity that [...]
Andre Stitt: SUBSTANCE
Golden Thread Gallery - Belfast, UK
By Slavka Sverakova
Andre Stitt (b.1958) selected scores, posters, objects and videos related to his performances between 1978 and 2008. To objects displayed at the Spacex, Exeter in 2008, for the Belfast version, he added inject prints, a triptych, film footage of bomb attacks, filmed interview and archival boxes containing clothing, [...]
Damián Ortega – Capital Less
Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York
September 17 - October 31, 2009
By Jeff Edwards
Long-sighted and quietly but insistently reflective, Damián Ortega sometimes seems like the passionate sage of political artists. Instead of ideological screeds, his best works often read like the musings of a world-weary philosopher compelled to question the value of our endless efforts to secure [...]
Jennifer Steinkamp: Orbit
ACME Gallery, Los Angeles
October 17 - November 14, 2009
By Lara Taubman
An argument with one of my colleagues over the gravity of Jennifer Steinkamp’s work made me rethink her latest installation Orbit at ACME in Los Angeles. Steinkamp is a mid-career animation artist, who emerged just footsteps behind the generation of the Feminist artists of the [...]
Morality: Act I & II
Act I: Beautiful from Every Point of View
Act II: From Love to Legal
Witte de With, Amsterdam
By Caridad Botella
The Witte de With, Centre for Contemporary Art in Rotterdam has chosen to articulate its program around the concept “Morality” as leitmotiv. “Morality” is an assemblage of exhibitions, performances, interventions, projects and dialogues that will take place [...]
Harold Klunder: 4 Paintings
By David Liss
During the rise of neo-expressionist painting in the 1980s, then Toronto painter Harold Klunder established a reputation as one of Canada’s leading figures of the era, with huge-scale, intensely colored, densely impasto paintings of imaginatively constructed forms that hovered at the cusp of figuration and abstraction. As the winds of fashion shifted in [...]
Hannes Schmid: Rockstars
Gallery Nicola von Senger, Zurich
Through December 24, 2009
By Oliver Kielmayer
It was rather late when Hannes Schmid (*1946) became interested in contemporary art; besides working for big fashion magazines like Vogue, Elle and Cosmopolitan or designers like Kenzo and Armani, for more than a decade he was busy shooting the Marlboro campaign. His indifference towards [...]
The Prevailing Forces - Eugenia Calvo
713 Contemporary Art, Buenos Aires
By María Carolina Baulo
The exhibition presented by the Argentine artist Eugenia Calvo focused on daily objects, dealing with highly powerful concepts, such as uniformity and diversity, and analyzing the roles each one plays while keeping its individuality even when interacting within a superior order.
The installation addressed the usage of furniture and [...]
