Art in America articles from February 2005

Art in America archives from February 2005

Underground museum for Osaka.(Front Page)
February 1, 2005... Osaka Japan's second largest city, recently inaugurated its new National Museum of Art designed by Cesar Pelli & Associates. The museum is located on Nakano Island in the heart of the downtown financial and cultural district. Created by an...

Barnes relocation wins court approval.(Front Page)
February 1, 2005... Described by turns as inevitable, imprudent or tragic, the planned relocation of the Barnes Foundation's prized collection from suburban Lower Merion to downtown Philadelphia received court approval on Dec. 13. Since 2002, the Barnes has been...

Critics' top picks for 2003-3004.(Front Page)
February 1, 2005... Some 400 members of the U.S. chapter of AICA (the International Association of Art Critics) recently voted for their favorite exhibitions of the 2003-04 season. At the group's Jan. 25 ceremony, NYU professor Robert Rosenblum was honored for his...

Lower Manhattan in high gear.(Front Page)
February 1, 2005... Last month, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) received $5 million from the September 11th Fund. The sum is the largest ever given to a cultural institution by the post-9/11 charity, which has raised over $500 million for victims'...

Yokohama Triennale trouble.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Plans for the second Yokohama Triennale were abruptly thrown into disarray when architect Arata Isozaki resigned as director in early December. He had accepted the position just six months earlier, prompting many art-world observers to wonder...

First award from Fernwood.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... In December, the Boston-based firm Fernwood Art Investments, a recently formed private research and investment company focused on the art market, announced Miami's Wolfsonian-Florida International University as the first recipient of the...

Monumental sculpture for Portuguese port.(Front Page)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... A large-scale sculpture by Janet Echelman will soon be inaugurated near Porto on the Atlantic coast in northern Portugal. A $1.66-million European Union commission, the sculpture, titled She Changes, is a giant multi-layered circular net...

A new Catholic iconography?(Book Review)
February 1, 2005... Postmodern Heretics: The Catholic Imagination in Contemporary Art, by Eleanor Heartney, New York, Midmarch Press, 2004; 192 pages, $24 paper. The controversies rehearsed in Eleanor Heartney's new book--involving artists such as Karen...

Where there's smoke: Xu Bing, one of China's most illustrious post-Tianannmen expatriate artists, recently mounted his first mainland solo, "Tobacco Project: Shanghai.".(Report From Shanghai)
February 1, 2005... When Xu Bing first visited Durham, N.C., at the invitation of Duke University in 2000, he was struck by the overwhelming tobacco odor pervading the town. The smell inspired him to put together the site-specific exhibition "Tobacco Project:...

The extraterritorial zone: the 26th Sao Paulo Bienal featured an indoor sculpture garden and a curatorial concept of "image smuggling" between cultures.(Report From Sao Paulo)
February 1, 2005... In an introduction to one of three volumes documenting the 26th edition of the Bienal de Silo Paulo--the world's second largest ongoing exhibition program of its kind (1)--curator Alfons Hug (2) proposes the event as a nonhierarchical free...

The camera and the flesh: a pair of recent museum shows in France and Spain surveyed the daring, sensual portraits of photographer Ariane Lopez-Huici.(Photography)(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... Ariane Lopez-Huici's portrait photographs have a definite performative aspect. By acts of supreme cajoling, this diminutive photographer gets all kinds of people, big and small, to reveal their radical, often radically unconventional, beauty....

Subjective state: recently on view in New York, a two-venue exhibition of contemporary art from South Africa conveyed a refreshing cultural openness 10 years after the demise of apartheid.(Import/Export)
February 1, 2005... A decade after South Africa held its first democratic elections in 1994, exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. marked the anniversary by taking stock of the country's contemporary art scene. "Personal Affects: Power and Poetics in Contemporary...

Captivating strangers: Turkish artist Kutlug Ataman creates videos in which people reveal their psychological fixations, social grievances, and artistic or spiritual quandaries. His astute installations place the viewer squarely in the midst of these absorbing lives.(Critical Essay)(Cover Story)
February 1, 2005... These are good days for Kutlug Ataman, a 43-year-old Turkish artist who divides his time between Istanbul, London and elsewhere. He has a new video installation in the Carnegie International, for which he won the Carnegie Prize; he was a...

Jessica Stockholder: a merging of mediums: since the 1980s, Stockholder has used everyday items and liberally applied paint to create distinctive sculpture-painting hybrids. A traveling survey of her sculptures goes on view this month at the Weatherspoon Art Museum.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... The concept of sculpture has changed so much in recent decades that most of what is currently classified as sculpture bears little resemblance to the millennia-old tradition of carved or cast figures. Practically any three-dimensional object...

Allegories of painting: in large-scale, elaborately worked canvases, Vincent Desiderio presents ambiguous narratives that refer to his life, our times and the history of Western art.
February 1, 2005... A keen observer of the mysteries of the emblematic in Western art, Vincent Desiderio invests his paintings with matters of interest to him: originality, the uses of technique, the construction of allegory, the burden of the variety and richness...

Shanghai accelerates: bringing together over 100 Chinese and international artists, the fifth Shanghai Biennale examined methods of visual representation, old and new, in the context of the PRC's most beguiling and progressive city.
February 1, 2005... Everyone is astonished by Shanghai, above all the Chinese themselves. The city's heady mix of futuristic towers and throbbing street life, its current multibillion-dollar building boom, its quest for new money and brand names (with an attendant...

Gary Schneider: facing time: using a lengthy exposure and a handheld flashlight to illuminate his subjects, photographer Gary Schneider creates large-format portraits--holistic body vistas, each of which is also the record of a performance.(Critical Essay)
February 1, 2005... Gary Schneider, who was born in South Africa in 1954, is best known today for Genetic Self-Portrait. This expansive and dramatically heterogeneous work depicts the exterior and interior of the artist's body. The core group of 14 photographs...

The painted parables of Robert Schwartz: diminutive gouaches by the late San Francisco artist incorporate old-master allusions and theatrical artifices within a highly emblematic display. A recent exhibition offered a rare overview of Schwartz's mature career.
February 1, 2005... In a monochrome blue light, amid a cold landscape of bare trees and gentle hillocks, a nude male and female couple bathes, embracing in what looks like a flooded quarry or ruin, surrounded by a wall of tenting. Outside the curtain, two women,...

Rackstraw Downes at Betty Cuningham.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Rackstraw Downes's stated aim to paint what lies before him in as straightforward a way as possible He does so, he has written, not a "a way of using painting to look a nature," but rather as a way of using nature to discover "fresh ways of...

Mark Tansey at Gagosian.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Mark Tansey's work has always been characterized by a dissonance born of the contrast between his paintings' dry illustrative style and their abstract and often abstruse subjects. Previous canvases have presented the heroes of the School of...

Pat Lipsky at Elizabeth Harris.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Pat Lipsky began exhibiting in New York in the late 1960s at Andre Emmerich Gallery, working in the prevailing mode of gestural abstraction. Over the last couple of decades (she stopped showing regularly between the late '70s and late '80s),...

Gilbert & George at Sonnabend and Lehmann Maupin.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Gilbert & George have long trafficked in perversity, filling their large, gridded photoworks with monumental paeans to body fluids and functions, and lustful considerations of adolescent East End boys, while thrusting their own rigidly...

Alessandra Sanguinetti at Yossi Milo.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Photographers are drawn to children for good reasons: they are open and unself-conscious, and seem more able and willing than adults to move in and out of their fantasy lives in front of the camera. But few photographers are lucky enough to...

Alex Forman at David Krut projects.(New York)
February 1, 2005... For Alex Forman's first New York solo show, the gallery's walls were painted a rich, deep red, mimicking the White House's somber Red Room and setting the mood for the carbon-pigment digital prints on view (all works 2004). Each portrait--or...

Kenro Izu at Howard Greenberg.(New York)
February 1, 2005... At first glance, many of the nudes featured in Kenro Izu's "Blue" series--large-format (14-by-20-inch) palladium-and-platinum-with-cyanotype prints--seem as utterly straightforward as the spare, meditative architectural photographs of Asian...

Louise Lawler at Metro Pictures.(New York)
February 1, 2005... How do paintings look after-hours? Offstage? Is there indignity in being moved around like a crate of perishables? And--key question--do photographs leach value from art (the Benjaminian chestnut) or bestow it? Louise Lawler has addressed these...

Margaret Honda at the Drawing Room.(New York)
February 1, 2005... For her first solo exhibition in New York, L.A.-based artist Margaret Honda presented "Transfer Pictures," a site-specific installation reflecting her longstanding, and often deeply personal, preoccupation with abstraction, history and memory....

Enrique Marty at Bryce Wolkowitz.(New York)
February 1, 2005... The Spanish-born Enrique Marty's introductory U.S. show comprised painting, video and sculpture. The wall-hung paintings acted as a backdrop for three sculptures placed in the center of the gallery. In Children's Games (1998), a story unfolds...

Dirk Skreber at Friedrich Petzel.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Having exhibited widely in Europe, Dusseldorf-based Dirk Skreber recently made his New York solo debut with a show consisting of three enormous oils (99 by 158 inches each) derived from magazine and Internet photographs, and a fourth, quite...

Virgil Marti at Elizabeth Dee.(New York)
February 1, 2005... When, in the not-too-distant future, glossy shelter magazines feature moon-base decor, there's a good chance the photo spreads will resemble mixed-medium artist Virgil Marti's exhibition of seven high-concept artworks--that is, of course, if...

Matt Mullican at Tracy Williams.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Through a finely honed selection of works, most dated 2004, the exhibition "Nothing Should Exist" explored the world according to Matt Mullican. It was the artist's means of reckoning with a universe demonstrably overburdened by material...

Ashley Bickerton at Sonnabend.(New York)
February 1, 2005... A smoldering mandala featuring Kali as tropical princess, Ashley Bickerton's A God (2004) appeared among a group of formidable panel paintings in his first New York exhibition in five years. A penumbra of fiery purple encircles this...

Charles Ginnever at Wooster Art Space.(New York)
February 1, 2005... The 15 pieces in Charles Ginnever's last show were billed as "Large Sculpture Maquettes"--models for the "Rashomon Series," 13-foot-high sculptures of which three have been built. Ginnever emerged in the 1960s, in the company of Tom Doyle, Mark...

Sofi Zezmer at Mike Weiss.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Born in Lodz, trained in New York and based since 1995 in Wiesbaden, Sofi Zezmer has lately consolidated the physical scope of her installation work, focusing her choice of materials and fabricating discrete sculptures. Constructed chiefly of...

Dirk Westphal at Mixed Greens.(New York)
February 1, 2005... It's easy to imagine Dirk Westphal's meticulous C-prints of preternaturally colorful fish turning up in the pages of National Geographic, Scientific American or some other publication dedicated to extraordinary phenomena of the natural world....

Maria Marshall at Team.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Among eternal everyday mysteries, the inner world of childhood ranks high. Maria Marshall has been exploring this territory for several years, using her two young sons as subjects in videos that take slanted perspectives on innocence and also,...

Elliott Arkin at Artek Contemporaries.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Elliott Arkin's first solo exhibition turned the tables on our tendency to reduce the history of art to a carousel of slides. Straddling the line between homage and parody, his minuscule, meticulously carved clay caricatures are housed within...

Robin Rhode at Perry Rubenstein.(New York)
February 1, 2005... A controversial work from 2000, Leak, reveals much about the manner in which the young, South Africa-born artist Robin Rhode, now based in Berlin, has sought to fuse the swagger of hip-hop with the ephemerality of performance art. In it, Rhode...

Michael Bevilacqua at Deitch Projects.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Michael Bevilacqua's slick, eye-assaulting paintings have, in the past, appropriated everything from high-end fashion labels to modernist artworks and insignia of punk bands. Weaving his favorite cultural products into a kind of fantasy...

Edith Isaac-Rose at Phyllis Kind.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Edith Isaac-Rose makes no attempt to seduce the eye in her figurative drawings and paintings, seeking instead to provoke more visceral reactions. "Cronies," her recent exhibition at Phyllis Kind, included works from 1990 to 2004. Her subject...

China Marks at Luise Ross.(New York)
February 1, 2005... China Marks began using a sewing machine to make her artwork only three years ago, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the 14 intricate pieces on view here. In her earlier work, the artist, who is in her early 60s, concentrated on drawings...

Jerry Jofen and Thomas Lanigan-Schmidt at Pavel Zoubok.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Not since the Swingline factory was converted into MOMA QNS has the lowly staple received such earnest attention. "Stapled to the Soul," Pavel Zoubok's inaugural show in his Chelsea storefront, paired the unlikely duo of late...

"Ocean Flowers: Impressions from Nature" at the Drawing Center.(New York)
February 1, 2005... In the conventional version of photographic history--a story of technological advancement over the hand, culminating in images of limitless reproducibility--the photographic images in this show would be no more than footnotes, false starts....

Cecily Kahn at Lohin Geduld.(New York)
February 1, 2005... If her slightly warped geometry and dissonant, high-keyed colors sometimes suggest the cartoon world of Elizabeth Murray, Cecily Kahn is more deeply rooted in the tradition of abstraction. Her recent, modestly scaled paintings abound in...

Vicky Colombet at Haim Chanin.(New York)
February 1, 2005... The lyrical, reductive paintings of French-born, New York-based artist Vicky Colombet often offer exciting abstract passages that remind us of Agnes Martin and Brice Marden, as critic Nena Tsouti-Schillinger points out in her catalogue essay....

Cora Cohen at Jason McCoy.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Of the formerly avant-garde practice of gestural abstraction, Cora Cohen is a prominent defender of the faith, and these eight paintings from 2004 might convince any doubters of its continued viability. The artist's tenacity and fearlessness...

Santi Moix at Paul Kasmin.(New York)
February 1, 2005... Fledgling authors are often taught that perfectionism--not error--is the enemy of great writing; only through fearless means can they arrive at a noteworthy final draft. Transpose this concept to painting, and it's clear why many artists find...

Joseph Fiore at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art.(Rockport, Maine)
February 1, 2005... "Joseph Fiore: The Stone Paintings, 1975 to the Present" gathered 21 oils by the Cleveland-born, New York-based painter, who studied with Albers, de Kooning and Bolotowsky at Black Mountain College in the early 1950s. Fiore showed at Stable...

Jim Sanborn at the Corcoran.(Washington, D.C.)
February 1, 2005... Jim Sanborn's complex installation "Critical Assembly," the most striking part of his exhibition called "Atomic Time: Pure Science and Seduction," consisted of a room full of scientific equipment related to the development of the first atomic...

Aaron Parazette at the Contemporary Arts Museum.(Houston)
February 1, 2005... The thickly painted splashes and splats derived from clip art in Aaron Parazette's previous paintings have been replaced in his most recent efforts by architectonic, hard-edge letters that spell out a word or phrase in suffer lingo. The surf...

John Beech at Charlotte Jackson.(Santa Fe)
February 1, 2005... Over the course of a 15-year career, John Beech has become known for wittily transforming--or appropriating the shapes of--everyday industrial objects such as car-floor mats, Dumpsters and parking-lot bumpers. This recent show comprised 11...

Jerome Witkin at Jack Rutberg.(Los Angeles)
February 1, 2005... Jerome Witkin's recent show, titled "Site and Insight," was a museum-quality exhibition featuring 47 major oil paintings and works on paper spanning the past 15 years. The 65-year-old painter, based in Syracuse, N.Y., is widely regarded as a...

Jacci Den Hartog at Christopher Grimes.(Santa Monica)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Jacci Den Hartog's colored, cast polyurethane and steel sculptures of falling or moving water are like stop-action concretions of the crashing waves and thundering cascades depicted by Romantic painters. Similarly, a few recall the patterned...

Stephen De Staebler at Paul Thiebaud.(San Francisco)
February 1, 2005... The six freestanding bronze figural sculptures in this recent exhibition dated from 2003, but all featured elements that echoed the artist's earlier works. In a kind of recombinant assemblage process, Stephen De Staebler uses and reuses ceramic...

Luigi Ontani at Lorcan O'Neill.(Rome)
February 1, 2005... For his first exhibition at Lorcan O'Neill, Luigi Ontani pulled out all the stops. Titled "Eros dei Eroii," the show comprised dozens of works, spanning 30 years to the present, that investigate our love for heroes and incorporate a range of...

Le Vu at Ryllega.(Hanoi)
February 1, 2005... Founded by a young artist named Nguyen Minh Phuoc, Ryllega is the first commercial gallery in Hanoi to concentrate on presenting non-commercial work, primarily performances and installations. Phuoc, who also works in these mediums, told me that...

Lionel Budd at Jonathan Smart.(Christchurch, N.Z.)
February 1, 2005... Lionel Budd is engaged in a strain of self-effacing conceptualism that runs through current New Zealand art. Other such practitioners include Aucklander Michael Shepherd, who uses 17th-century trompe roeil painting techniques to fabricate faux...

Art services.(Directory)(Directory)
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Obituaries.(Artworld)
February 1, 2005... Agnes Martin, abstract painter, died Dec. 16 in Taos, N.M., age 92. An obituary will appear in our March issue. Susan Sontag, 71, author and critic, died Dec. 27 in Manhattan. An obituary will appear in our March issue. Ed Paschke, 65,...

UBS Collection for MOMA.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... This month, the Museum of Modern Art in New York presents "Contemporary Voices: Works from the UBS Art Collection," the first full-scale temporary exhibition in its new galleries. On view Feb. 4-Apr. 25, the show features 74 major pieces from...

Guggenheim cancels Cezanne Show.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... In December, the Guggenheim Museum in New York announced the cancellation of "Cezanne: The Dawn of Modernism," which was to have opened on Feb. 10. The show would have featured a selection of 48 works from the more than 100 pieces on view at...

Brooklyn Museum.(People)
February 1, 2005... Charles Desmarais is the new deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum. From 1995 until 2004, he was director of the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati, where he oversaw the construction of the CAC's Zaha Hadid-designed facility, which...

Tate Modern.(People)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Maria Prather has been named curator of American art at the Tate Modern in London, a part-time position. She was curator of postwar art at the Whitney Museum of American Art from 1999 to 2004, and curator and department head of 20th-century art...

San Francisco Art Institute.(People)
February 1, 2005... Okwui Enwezor, artistic director of Documenta XI in 2002 and curator of the 1997 Johannesburg Biennial, has been appointed clean of academic affairs at the San Francisco Art Institute. Enwezor assumes his new post July 1, replacing Larry...

Catherine David.(People)
February 1, 2005... Catherine David, chief curator at Witte de With in Rotterdam, has completed her three-year term at the contemporary art center. She joined the staff in 2002 as artistic director. She will begin teaching at Humboldt University in Berlin. Witte...

Jeremy Deller has won the 2004 Turner Prize, worth approximately $48,000 and given by the Tate Britain.(Awards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Jeremy Deller has won the 2004 Turner Prize, worth approximately $48,000 and given by the Tate Britain. Other finalists, who receive about $9,600 each, were Yinka Shonibare, Kutlug Ataman and the team of Langlands and Bell.

Winners of the National Medal of Arts for 2004 were recently announced by President Bush.(Awards)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Winners of the National Medal of Arts for 2004 were recently announced by President Bush. The recipients are the late sculptor Frederick Hart, choreographer and dancer Twyla Tharp, wildlife artist John Ruthven, architectural historian Vincent...

New prize for Texas artists.(Artworld)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Arthouse (formerly the Texas Fine Art Association), a nonprofit visualart organization in Austin, has launched the ambitious Arthouse Texas Prize. Funded by a group of supporters, the $30,000 biennial award will be given to an artist who has...

Tom Wesselmann, 1931-2004.(Artworld)(Obituary)
February 1, 2005... Tom Wesselmann, 73, a seminal figure in the Pop art movement, died of heart failure in New York on Dec. 17. Born in Cincinnati, Wesselmann earned a BA in psychology at the University of Cincinnati before studying at the Art Academy of...