Carnegie Museum of Art - Pittsburgh
Curated by Tina Kukielski
By Stephen Knudsen
No longer do most of us give a second thought to the invasion of lowbrow [pop]ulism in the elitist white cube. Warhol’s Marilyns and Elvises have begotten Koon’s puppies, Hirst’s sharks, Murakami’s superflats, and much more. The ubiquity of such work asks a simple question: [...]
Park Avenue - New York
By Stephen Knudsen
Alexandre Arrechea’s No Limits1 is so good that I am going to skip the dance drill and stake out a conclusion right from the beginning. The 10 sculptures are unpardonably smart, humorous and beautiful-with Kantian flourishes of spirit.2
With art history’s grand narrative annulled (thanks, Arthur Danto), [...]
By Stephen Knudsen
I will admit, as academia clamors to find some term for “whatever-we-call-coming-after” postmodernism, I long for the days of yore when the nomenclature took little effort. Often, names came as easy as quips: Malevich meant no compliment when he easily coined “construction art” to describe the work of Alexander Rodchenko. Then [...]
By Stephen Knudsen
I was at Lois Dodd’s 60-year retrospective at the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art the August day I got the news that critic Robert Hughes had passed away at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx, New York. To get this news amidst paintings in a museum was like being in the sanctum [...]
By Stephen Knudsen
The first museum retrospective for artist Rashid Johnson-an exhibition originating at MCA Chicago this summer and now at the Miami Art Museum-is refreshing the concept of post-black art, a term that has been mulled over by academics for two decades.1
Johnson lectured on his retrospective, “Message to Our Folks,” for a gathering [...]
Since 2002, Angela Strassheim’s photographs have probed female identity, family, religion, and memory with unflinching grit. Her inclusion in the 2006 Whitney Biennial: Day For Night was a break-out moment that launched her career and a media buzz about her work. Her photographic prints have been featured in half a dozen other museum [...]
David Zwirner Gallery - New York
By Stephen Knudsen
Neo Rauch got a second wind in New York, recovering from the cramped curation of his exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2007-a show that had his paintings ducking low ceilings both figuratively and literally. In the 2011 show at the David Zwirner Gallery, [...]
For two decades, artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila (b.1959) has been a central figure in the vanguard movement of putting a new face on film installation art. Chrissie Iles, Curator at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, identifies the phenomenon as bringing the “black box of cinema into the white box of [...]
