Art in America articles from November 2007

Art in America archives from November 2007

Mass MoCA axes Buchel show.(FRONT PAGE)(case between Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art and artist Christoph Buchel)
November 1, 2007... On Sept. 21, a federal district court judge ruled on a case that has had art-world observers polarized. Judge Michael Ponsor found in favor of the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, which had sought permission to open an unfinished,...

Ullens Center opens in Beijing.(FRONT PAGE)(Ullens Center for Contemporary Art)
November 1, 2007... Occupying a total of nearly 70,000 square feet, the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA) opens Nov. 5 in Beijing's Dashanzi art district, known familiarly as Factory 798, a refurbished industrial area currently home to some 300 art...

Barnes names architects.(FRONT PAGE)(Tod Williams and Billie Tsien)
November 1, 2007... The Barnes Foundation, still beset with legal troubles related to its plans to move from suburban Merion to downtown Philadelphia, recently handed the formidable task of designing its new building to the husband and wife team of Tod Williams...

Chinese art before the gold rush.(FRONT PAGE)(launch of a magazine that deals with contemporary Chinese art)
November 1, 2007... With the international art market increasingly abuzz over recent Chinese art, a striking new English-language periodical has been launched with the intent of filling in a history little known in the West--or even in the People's Republic...

New art fair for a New Shanghai.(FRONT PAGE)(contemporary art fair called ShContemporary)
November 1, 2007... The first installment of Shanghai's new contemporary art fair, which ran Sept. 6-9 under the cryptic title ShContemporary, may not have put Shanghai or China on the global art map as some organizers claimed that it would--since by most accounts...

Performa 07 takes the stage.(FRONT PAGE)(performance art festival)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... Heating up New York City's already feverish fall art season, approximately 100 performance artists are presenting works in 25 venues scattered throughout the city as part of Performa 07, taking place Oct. 27Nov. 20. According to organizer...

African Art for Museum Mile.(FRONT PAGE)(New York's Museum for African Art)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... New York's Museum for African Art, the peripatetic institution that has been housed in a number of locations throughout the city since its founding in 1984, will finally have a permanent home. The museum recently broke ground for its new...

Asia Society to build collection.(FRONT PAGE)(Asia Society Museum)(Brief article)
November 1, 2007... New York's Asia Society Museum recently announced a gift of 28 works of new media and video art to launch an acquisitions program for contemporary Asian and Asian-American works. Among the 28 pieces given to the museum by trustees Harold and...

The Belle of books.(An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... An Illuminated Life: Belle da Costa Greene's Journey from Prejudice to Privilege, by Heidi Ardizzone, New York, W.W. Norton & Company, 2007; 580 pages, $26.95. As J.P. Morgan's personal librarian and, after the Morgan Library was opened to...

Ab-Ex confidential: the way they were.(New York art history books)(Book review)
November 1, 2007... Club Without Walls: Selections from the Journals of Philip Pavia, edited by Natalie Edgar, New York, Midmarch Arts Press, 2007; 186 pages, $25.00. The Writings of Robert Motherwell, edited by Dore Ashton with Joan Banach, Berkeley and Los...

The new grass roots: in which five bloggers, based in Seattle, Philadelphia, Portland, Washington, D.C., and New York, provide an inside look at the growing presence of art writing online.(REPORT FROM THE BLOGOSPHERE)
November 1, 2007... When I wrote "Contemporary Art, Uncovered," about the decline in visual arts coverage in the popular press [see A.i.A., Feb. '07], I made an offhand remark about blogs that said, "mere people in the audience for contemporary art would rather...

Preserving the local: the fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial, expanding into the new Gallery of Modern Art, Australia's largest contemporary art museum, kept its focus on culturally specific themes.(REPORT FROM BRISBANE)
November 1, 2007... The launch of the fifth Asia-Pacific Triennial (APT5) coincided with the opening of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA), Australia's largest contemporary art museum. Erected 25 years after its parent institution, the modernist Queensland Art...

Behind the wheel with Henry Wessel: this restless chronicler of the American West was recently the subject of shows in San Francisco, New York and Cologne.(PHOTOGRAPHY)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Henry Wessel has been having solo shows regularly on the West Coast for over 20 years, but rarely anywhere else. The notable exception was his first one-person museum exhibition, in 1973, at the Museum of Modern Art...

Continental drift: the largest exhibition of contemporary African art ever assembled, "Africa Remix" revealed a startling range of practice, much of it little known till now to the world at large.(REPORT FROM JOHANNESBURG)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] The colonial encounter is inscribed throughout Africa, from the architecture and layout of its cities to the bodies of its former subjects. As you might expect, many artists in the present day pick at the sizable...

Street smarts: a series of "actions" that wove through disparate neighborhoods in New York City also tracked the byways of performance art's local history.(PERFORMANCE)(Six Actions for New York City)
November 1, 2007... What was it like to spontaneously encounter an interventionist "action" in New York, say a 1970 appearance by Adrian Piper at Max's Kansas City, the night she milled about the club gloved, blindfolded, and with nose and ears plugged to block...

Village of light: in an exhibition organized by the Savannah College of Art and Design, seven artists installed works throughout the medieval town of Lacoste, where the school has its French campus.(REPORT FROM PROVENCE)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] "Afterglow" was the perfect summer show: well-groomed and impeccably civilized with a thoughtful mix of the ecological, the poetic, the glamorous, the ideological and the engage. Its other indispensable asset was the...

Winged victory: Coop Himmelb(l)au's addition to the Akron Art Museum is a triumph of bold visual statement, active engagement with its urban context and flexible interior space.(ARCHITECTURE)
November 1, 2007... Cities that have lived by the car have nearly died by it. The cars Detroit produced headed toward the suburbs and eventually vitiated the city. Akron produced tires, and it withered in a similar exodus. But the shells of their formerly thriving...

In the land of make-believe: a recent museum show presented the work of Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman and Suzy Lake, three pioneers in the art of the invented persona.(REPORT FROM SANTA MONICA)
November 1, 2007... "Identity Theft," the thoroughly enjoyable and timely curatorial debut of Los Angeles-based art writer Jori Finkel, included groundbreaking work made between 1972 and 1978 by Eleanor Antin, Lynn Hershman and Suzy Lake. Recently on view at the...

A wary regard for tradition: given a centuries-old history of individual creative art in clay, where does the contemporary Japanese ceramist go from here?(CERAMICS)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] "No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone." So wrote T.S. Eliot in his classic essay, "Tradition and the Individual Talent." Eliot claimed that rather than existing in conflict with tradition,...

How to do things with buildings: the work of Gordon Matta-Clark, lately the subject of renewed attention, is generously surveyed in a traveling exhibition. A striking feature shared by his building cuts and photographs as well as his films is their performative nature.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] There are two things to be said about demolition work. The first is how difficult it is to work up the courage to knock a sledgehammer into a pristine wall, and the second is how surprisingly sturdy that wall is...

Mary Heilmann: coloring outside the lines: a more quixotic--and less ironic--artist than some of her friendliest critics have acknowledged, Heilmann has been a risk-taker throughout her career. A traveling exhibition surveys 40 years of her work.(Cover story)
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] One mistake critics often make is giving an artist too much credit. Or, more precisely, seeing a twist, turn, angle or extra fillip where, really, there is none. Take me and Mary Heilmann. I used to think that her...

Vestiges of memory: themes of separation, dislocation and entrapment pervade the work of Afro-Cuban artist Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, as she devises her own vocabulary of adaptation.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Everything Is Separated by Water," the first full-scale survey of the varied works of Maria Magdalena Campos-Pons, gives thoughtful, due consideration to a prominent Cuban-born artist whose international reputation...

Things he carried: Kim Jones's retrospective features sculpture, graphic works, and the documentation and relics of Mudman, his earth-smeared performance alter ego, who appears in a pantyhose mask and foam-rubber headdress with a stick structure on his back.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A talisman, index and summary of the primary preoccupations of the protean Kim Jones, Atlas bears a heavy psychic and material burden. It is a 25-foot-long site-specific installation of dozens of rough bundles of...

The fine art of word slicing: in "room pieces" composed of metal pipes, black tape and adhesive letters, Brussels-based American-born artist Peter Downsbrough playfully engages the logic of linguistic and spatial order.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The mark of the philosopher is to doubt what is usually taken for granted, and to think how everything could "just as easily" be otherwise.... It is a way of questioning the stereotyped habits of the mind, since only...

Stalking the imperceptible: a sampling of paintings and drawings from the last decade of Andrew Forge's life showed this revered teacher and critic to have been a master at capturing elusive perceptual experiences.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Andrew Forge's rigorous, disquieting pictures, which demand concentrated looking before they begin to yield their mysteries and appear to be purely about the experience of seeing, are hard to write about. To...

Rock out: heavy metal met minimalist form in Banks Violette's recent exhibitions at two New York galleries. Fire, ice and noise gave the installations a chaotic edge.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Despite his inclusion in many high-profile museum shows, Banks Violette had not had a solo gallery exhibition in New York for five years, and this twofold return, at Gladstone and Team, was undeniably ambitious....

Remixing the past: melting down or pulverizing an eccentric array of materials, Dario Robleto then fashions them into relic-like objects with the sheen of historical authenticity.
November 1, 2007... A deep personal engagement with history is rare in the trend-obsessed world of contemporary art. The recycling of art ideas and styles from the 1970s by the young and oblivious has become an occasion for shrugs, or is even embraced by some...

Takashi Murakami at Gagosian.
November 1, 2007... In 1586, eager to demonstrate that his culture was on a par with his power, the Japanese hegemon Hideyoshi built a golden tearoom: its walls and doors were covered in gold leaf, as were its beams and ceiling, its furnishings and tea bowls. The...

Robert Ryman at PaceWildenstein.
November 1, 2007... At this point in his career, we may think we know what to expect from Robert Ryman, but that does not prepare us for the reinvigorating light, and lightness, displayed in his new exhibition. All his work hinges on a small range of tones and...

Suzanne McClelland at David Krut.
November 1, 2007... The unrestricted accumulation of evidence, in the form of mounting layers of notes, photographs, and sketches tacked willy-nilly to the wall, can be associated on the one hand with criminal investigations, and on the other with certain kinds of...

Alex Hay at Peter Freeman.
November 1, 2007... In his first solo show of new material in no less than 38 years, Alex Hay offered six paintings that, though unassuming, reveal an intensity of observation of commonplace subjects that is deeply moving. Equally stirring is his monklike devotion...

Assume vivid astro focus at John Connelly Presents.
November 1, 2007... Assume vivid astro focus (aka Eli Sudbrack) has made a number of installations characterized by an exuberant profusion of kitschy pop images, decorative motifs, light and sound. He often works in collaboration with other artists. For a show at...

Christian Boltanski at Marian Goodman.
November 1, 2007... Christian Boltanski's work typically engages image, light and time, but in his best-known pieces the characteristic quality is suppression: time stilled, image tenuous, history almost lost. A 2005 video installation, shown for the first time in...

Mike Nelson at the Essex Street Market.
November 1, 2007... The enormous challenge that British installation artist Mike Nelson takes on is to transcend the ponderous, labor-intensive mechanics of his work, to give the spectator a direct, emotionally compelling experience beyond the (admittedly...

Timothy Hutchings at I-20.
November 1, 2007... In the slim but influential 1913 volume Little Wars, H.G. Wells set out a body of rules for war games to be conducted with tin soldiers in playrooms or "on closely mown grass." Inspired by Wells's book and its progeny of the Warhammer ilk,...

Tim Hawkinson at PaceWildenstein.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] This show by the widely exhibited artist Tim Hawkinson, which was titled "How Man Is Knit" (an anagram of the artist's name), comprised 15 large and visually quite disparate works. In them, Hawkinson explores the...

Alain Kirili and Gaston Lachaise at Salander-O'Reilly.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In years past, Alain Kirili has exhibited his work alongside sculptures by Auguste Rodin, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux and Julio Gonzales. Continuing this practice of homage and juxtaposition, Kirili recently presented...

Nicole Wermers at Tanya Bonakdar.
November 1, 2007... Mild steel is a low-carbon steel that is both inexpensive and easily shaped. Nicole Wermers, a German artist based in London, used mild steel in the three "Forcefield" sculptures that made up part of her first New York solo exhibition (all...

Winifred Lutz at Zabriskie.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Winifred Lutz is known for her work in natural or mundane materials such as wood, stones, vines, concrete and especially handmade paper. The Philadelphia-based artist has made complex and large-scale installations,...

Robyn O'Neil at Clementine.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A colossally scaled, intricately detailed graphite drawing was the tour de force in "This is a descending world," Robyn O'Neil's recent show in which she put forth an imposing, if bleak, postapocalyptic vision....

David Godbold at Mitchell-Innes & Nash.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The question that English artist David Godbold posed in his first New York show, "The Unreliable Narrator," was, what should we believe? Long used as a literary device, the unreliable narrator can be so naive, like...

Eric Holzman at the New York Studio School.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] It is hard to imagine a contemporary artist further from today's prevailing sensibilities than Eric Holzman. Antithetical to the glossy bounce of most Chelsea fare, the 45 drawings (1990-2007) on view at the New York...

June Leaf at Edward Thorp.
November 1, 2007... June Leaf is a bricoleur. She has been creating art since 1948, and the two dozen pieces on display in this exhibition ranged, characteristically, from figurative and landscape paintings and a stunning self-portrait drawing to small toylike...

Michael Hursen at the Fisher Landau Center.
November 1, 2007... A reclining, comically bored frog lounges on the rock island at the center of Michael Hurson's 18 1/2-by-24 1/2-inch graphite-on-paper drawing Frog (1987), eyelids at half mast as though daydreaming of its manic angular pal in Coathanger...

Julian Lethbridge at Paula Cooper.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Julian Lethbridge's show of recent work featured 10 large paintings installed on the gallery's permanent walls as well as 40 small paintings hanging on a freestanding, cruciform structure situated in the center of...

Ingrid Calame at James Cohan.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ingrid Calame's ongoing "Secular Response" project has, quite literally, brought the California-based artist to her knees. Armed with immense rolls of Mylar and kneepads, Calame has spent the better part of the last...

Merrill Wagner at Sundaram Tagore.
November 1, 2007... Merrill Wagner's handsome wall reliefs (all 2006), made of steel scrap salvaged from a Pennsylvania plumbing parts manufacturer, evoke stylized garden plants. Assembled from varied shapes, each painted a single bold earthy color and, for the...

Francisca Sutil at Nohra Haime.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Francisca Sutil is a Chilean-born painter who studied and lived in New York from 1977 to 1992. She has since returned to her hometown, Santiago, but the years she spent in the United States made a strong impression...

Mary Lucier at Lennon, Weinberg.
November 1, 2007... Mary Lucier's new video installation The Plains of Sweet Regret is a poignant visual tone-poem on the emptying out of America's northernmost prairies. It surrounds the viewer with five projections fed by separate video channels, animating the...

Anna Gaskell at Yvon Lambert.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] If a video's protagonist is an actress--played by the artist-being led through a monologue about an unseen man by a largely oft-screen acting coach, who is speaking for whom? And who's calling the shots? Anna...

Mark Wyse at Wallspace.
November 1, 2007... In his fourth solo show at this gallery, Los Angeles-based photographer Mark Wyse presented a group of C-prints collectively called "Marks of Indifference" (all work 2006). The title is borrowed from a 1995 essay by Jeff Wall, an ambitious,...

Lazhar Mansouri at Westwood.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] That photographic negatives by Algerian portraitist Lazhar Mansouri (1932-1985) survive seems remarkable in itself. According to one published account, they narrowly escaped incineration at a time of civil unrest and...

William T. Wiley at Charles Cowles.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Ever the visual and verbal punster, William T. Wiley here aims his arsenal of folksy dialogue, cartoons, alchemical symbols, pop-culture quotations, art-historical references and film-derived imagery at the more...

Kevin Zucker at Greenberg Van Doren.
November 1, 2007... Kevin Zucker's previous paintings, of austere interiors, were bleached, spare and seductively atmospheric. In his recent exhibition, "Search Within Results," he moved beyond his fascination with structural spaces and into the accumulation and...

Kent Henricksen at John Connelly Presents.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In "Devine Deviltries," his second solo show at this gallery, Kent Henricksen expanded his approach in several ways, using wallpaper of his own design as a backdrop for nine silkscreened and embroidered canvases,...

Emilio Perez at Galerie Lelong.
November 1, 2007... Emilio Perez started this year's fall season at Galerie Lelong with a visual bang: 12 large-scale, acrylic-and-latex-on-wood-panel paintings (all from 2007) depicting graphic, Matthew Ritchieesque maelstroms of line and shape that explode,...

Gillian Carnegie at Andrea Rosen.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] British artist Gillian Carnegie routinely includes a painting of her own naked bum in solo exhibitions. It's like a signature even if we can't be sure the bum is really hers, as she's cropped out any way to ascertain...

Bill Scott at Hollis Taggart.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The more than 25 oil paintings and six prints in Bill Scott's recent exhibition, "Looking Through," reveal a new mastery of color placement, their layered, luminous compositions structured by loose geometry. After 12...

Gina Werfel at Prince Street.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Gina Werfers paintings, some of them plein-air, move easily between the hill country of northern California and that of Umbria, the similarities of light and terrain more evident, as she paints them, than the...

Carla Klein at Tanya Bonakdar.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Dutch painter Carla Klein makes spare, sweeping landscapes based on panoramic photographs she takes of vast open spaces. Set in parking lots and other flat expanses, the new paintings shown here (all 2007)...

Margo Victor at Venetia Kapernekas.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Los Angeles artist Margo Victor's solo debut consisted of stark black-and-white, mostly abstract paintings and drawings, as well as some experimental films. She seems to have been as influenced by cool-jazz album...

Juri Morioka at Merge.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Juri Morioka is a Japanese-born, New York-based artist, previously engaged in gestural abstraction, who now makes colorful paintings composed of geometrical forms. She first came to America as a high-school exchange...

Julie Evans at Julie Saul.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Julie Evans at Julie Saul Julie Evans's vibrant works resonate on several levels, from the cosmic to the earthly. She has made several trips to India, and studied miniature painting there and in Nepal on a...

"Americans in Paris: Abstract Painting in the 1950s" at Tibor de Nagy.
November 1, 2007... For all the talk about period styles, it's surprising just how distinctive the oeuvres of individual artists working in the same mode at the same place and time can be. For many, the phrase "American painting in Paris in the 1950s" probably...

Lesley Dill at the Neuberger Museum.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The main gallery at the Neuberger is notoriously difficult--a 50-by-80-foot black hole of a space with 20-foot-high walls and dark floor and ceiling. Characteristically, Lesley Dill's response was to find in it the...

Ying Li at Haverford College.
November 1, 2007... This large survey at Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery of Ying Li's paintings made mostly during the past three years focused on a group of landscapes as seen from her studio in Umbria, where she teaches in the summers. Located on a high hill...

Tom Green at George Mason University.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] When texts appear in visual art, no matter whether the viewer knows the language or even the alphabet, the work will have an aura of intelligibility. We're sensitive to the authority of printed language. Contemporary...

Jenny Dubnau at Bernice Steinbaum.
November 1, 2007... Jenny Dubnau's new work consists of large-scale paintings of herself, seen straight on and typically from the shoulders up, based on photographs that she took in unforgiving light against a neutral studio background. Some are in color and some...

Megan and Murray McMillan at White Flag Projects.
November 1, 2007... Confronting the viewer head-on with a 45-foot-long construction representing a humpback whale suspended inside the gallery, the installation Channelbone loomed large. The huge abstracted whale skeleton, covered almost entirely with translucent...

Theodore Halkin at Corbett vs. Dempsey.
November 1, 2007... Over nearly 60 years, Theodore Halkin has produced figurative, semi-abstract and abstract paintings; figurative and semi-abstract reliefs; palm-sized sculptures of his house; and sculpturally altered wooden furniture. Major events in Halkin's...

John Arndt at Rowland Contemporary.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] John Arndt at Rowland Contemporary John Arndt's recent exhibition "Variations on Aphonia" was, in essence, a tribute to John Cage. Here, sculptures, drawings and an audio installation combined to explore the...

Charles Pompilius at David Klein.
November 1, 2007... The first solo show in five years of the realist Charles Pompilius demonstrated that good things do come to those (viewers) who wait. The exhibition consisted of nine paintings made from 2005 to '07--most 2 by 3 feet and framed in dark wood...

David Schutter at Paul Kotula.
November 1, 2007... As part of a 2005-06 Humboldt Fellowship, Chicago-based artist David Schutter spent days in the Berlin Gemaldegalerie drawing from the examples of 17th-century Dutch art in the collection. Then, working from memory, he made a series of...

Rollin Marquette at the MIA.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Unlike many city museums, the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has maintained a cordial relationship with its local-artist audience through its long-running Minnesota Artists Exhibition Program (MAEP). The MAEP offers...

Tom Knechtel at Marc Selwyn.
November 1, 2007... Tom Knechtel's exhibition, titled "The Walled City," was perhaps his strongest to date, including three major paintings and a group of breathtakingly beautiful pastel drawings of horses on handmade papers that evoke the draftsmanship of...

John M. Miller at Margo Leavin.
November 1, 2007... John M. Miller's paintings are familiar to Los Angeles viewers who have encountered them in numerous solo and groups shows over the last three decades. Having decided on a compositional structure--a repeating pattern of diagonal bars on raw...

Channa Horwitz at Solway Jones.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] During this show of recent work by veteran Los Angeles artist Channa Horwitz, there hung, in the gallery's back office, a schematic pencil-and-collage version of her proposal (dated 1968) for "Art and Technology,"...

Brian Calvin at Marc Foxx.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] California-based painter Brian Calvin's show at Marc Foxx, his fourth since 2000, comprised seven looming close-up portraits (2007), all vividly colored and uncannily flat. While previous bodies of work featured...

Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen.
November 1, 2007... Jean Lowe at Rosamund Felsen Jean Lowe (b. 1960) is a satirist in the grand tradition of Daumier, Hogarth and Nast, although her vehicle is not the human face or figure. With penetrating wit and insight, she appropriates authoritative...

Geoffrey Chadsey at the Contemporary Museum.
November 1, 2007... In eight years, the drawings of Brooklyn-based Geoffrey Chadsey have undergone a significant transformation, from quiet portrait studies rendered in near-monochrome blue, or blue and red, colored pencil to works increasingly complex in process...

Zuka at Darthea Speyer.
November 1, 2007... [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Zuka continues to follow her own path, an unconventional one relative to contemporary trends. In two previous shows at Darthea Speyer, she explored the pictorial possibilities of cows. Her new paintings (all 2006;...

Christian Philipp Muller at the Museum fur Gegenwartskunst.
November 1, 2007... The last day in the life of Christian Philipp Muller is the topic of one of the earliest works in the career of the Swiss-born artist. Justly prominent in his first museum retrospective, this work evokes that fateful day by an empty brown...

Fabian Seiz at Spielhaus Morrison.
November 1, 2007... Entering Spielhaus Morrison, one is usually confronted by stairs leading to a cavernous industrial space set below street level. In Fabian Seiz's installation Oben ist wie Unten (Above Is as Below), the gallery's floor appeared to be raised: an...

Rashid Rana at Nature Morte.
November 1, 2007... The globe-trotting Pakistani artist Rashid Rana makes big photographs out of myriad little ones, combining them into striking images of the sort recently on display in his show "Reflected Looking," at Nature Morte (the East Village gallery of...