David Hockney, Bigger Trees Nearer Water
David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition is on view at the de Young Museum from October 26, 2013–January 20, 2014. From the museum: David Hockney: A Bigger Exhibition (October 26, 2013-January 20, 2014) marks the return of the celebrated British artist to California with an exhibition assembled exclusively for the de Young. Expansive in scope and monumental in scale, this […]
John Divola, As Far As I Could Get (R02F06), 10 Seconds
As Far As I Could Get is the first solo museum presentation of the work of John Divola. The exhibition is a collaborative project led by the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, with different components shown simultaneously at SBMA, LACMA, and the Pomona College Museum of Art. LACMA’s presentation includes Polaroid images of sculpted objects, serial […]
Anne Truitt, Remembered Sea
Here’s a favorite work from an excellent show of Anne Truitt’s sculptures, paintings, and drawings from the 1970s, many of which are exhibited for the first time in nearly forty years. The show is on view at Matthew Marks until October 26, 2013. From the gallery: Six wood sculptures covered in bands of rich color are on view. […]
Maureen Gallace at Overduin and Kite
From the show’s press release: “Gallace’s intimate paintings are based on photographs taken by the artist in her native New England. Gallace achieves an unsettling balance between the personal and the nondescript in her images. The settings depicted are familiar representations of tranquil New England homes and landscapes, but upon closer examination the focus shifts from […]
James Welling, Olson House Window
The Olson House, a National Historic Landmark, is owned and operated by the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine. See more of Welling’s current show at Maureen Paley Gallery in London here.
Matt Connors, Inflected Baffle (Green)
Matt Connors’s show at Karma‘s knock-out space on Great Jones Street is on view until October 5.
Ashley Bickerton at Lehmann Maupin
The Bali-based artist Ashley Bickteron has a show opening this week in New York at lived in New York in the 1980s, and made work that was then classified (perhaps unjustly) as “Neo-Geo.” By 1993, he left the US and traveled around the world, mostly surfing and finally landing in Bali. For more on Bickerton […]
The Gramsci Monument
The Gramsci Monument is closing on September 15. Writing in the New Yorker, Peter Schjeldahl called it “this year’s most captivating new art work.” To that I’d add that it’s also this year’s most debated art work. Be sure to see it before it closes to make your own decisions. Details here and here.
When Attitudes Become Form
Holland Cotter reports from Venice in the New York Times on the Prada Foundation’s remake of a seminal 1969 exhibition. He writes: The original version, which took place in Bern, Switzerland, has a near-mythical reputation as a late-20th-century landmark. It brought together some of the most adventurous young European and American avant-gardists of the day, […]
“Architecture for Dogs”
An exhibition at the Long Beach Museum of Art this summer––the name says it all! Closes on September 1. The project debuted at Design Miami in early December, and includes collaborations with many notable designers and architects from America, Europe, and Japan. Check this website, which offers free blueprints for thirteen different DIY doghouses, each one custom-made for […]
Postcard from Playa Pelada
We hadn’t spent too much time at Playa Pelada (a short walk from the well worth an afternoon, and great for sunsets. It seems to be mostly secluded on weekdays and busier on weekends.
Robert Irwin, Scrim veilBlack rectangleNatural light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
The Whitney takes the prize for the most cooling and indeed refreshing show this summer: Robert Irwin’s recreation of his site-specific 1977 piece for the museum. Roberta Smith aptly describes the show in a recent NYT review: “Scrim Veil — Black Rectangle — Natural Light, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York” is an installation piece […]
Postcard from Playa Ostional
We just missed the turtles nesting on this black sand beach, but an afternoon tropical torrential downpour. It seems like the region is having so much more rain this year than last in late July. No complaints, of course.
“The Cat Show” at White Columns
I’d be remiss not to mention here the best summer group show I’ve ever seen: “The Cat Show” at interviewed the curator, Rhonda Lieberman, in early June, and since then there’s been a ton of great press on the show. You can also keep up with more details on the show via Twitter. Postscript: Check […]
Koji Enokura at Blum & Poe
I’ve previously posted about Koji Enokura’s work but his current, exemplary show at Blum & Poe in Los Angeles deserves a special mention. The exhibition is on view until July 13. From the gallery: This exhibition features photographic documentation of his early installations, as well as cotton-fabric works from the 1980s and 1990s in which Enokura […]
Surfing in Habushi-ura, Japan
The NYT recently published a compelling profile by James Nestor on surfing in Niijima, a small island 100 miles southeast of Tokyo. Here’s an excerpt: Niijima, one of nine inhabited islands in Japan’s Izu archipelago, has been a place of many faces. Around the 18th century, during Japan’s Edo period, it served as an island prison for […]
Hilma af Klint, Altarbild, 1915
In af Klint’s pictorial universe, the semiotic level is never radically separated from the world of visual forms; her cosmic figures send out mysterious linguistic messages that, as a mystic, she seemed to channel from another dimension, often referring to herself in the second or third person. One of the spirits told her: “You are […]
Cloud 9 in Siargao Island
Ondine Cohane recently profiled “a teardrop-shaped island that’s just one of the Philippines’s 7,000-plus, and the southernmost refuge for travelers before the less politically stable region of Mindanao”: Siargao. She writes: [T]he island is known to surfers, largely because of its fabled break, endearingly called Cloud 9. It stands in the firmament of the best rides […]
Albert York, Woman and Skeleton, 1964
“Albert York: A Loan Exhibition” at Davis & Langdale Company is certainly one of the best shows I’ve seen this year. Presentations of canvases by this painter’s painter are rare and tend to be coveted by admirers—including collectors Lauren Bacall and Jackie Onassis. For a standout read on York, see Calvin Tomkins’s 1995 essay from the New […]
Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets
Ginia Bellafante profiles an exemplary New York exhibition—on view until June 14—in the NYT: “Jane Freilicher: Painter Among Poets,” an exhibition at the Tibor de Nagy Gallery in Midtown . . . places Ms. Freilicher’s work in the context of her exalted status among the poets of free online pokie machine games the New York School […]
Reto Pulfer: Zustandseffekte
Check out this mysterious, oceanic-ish installation at Swiss Institute in SoHo; it’s on view until June 23 and not to be missed. From SI: The enigmatic body of work by Swiss artist Reto Pulfer (b. 1981, lives in Berlin) might be said to occur at the intersection of architectural space and performance. In his first solo-exhibition in […]
Stranger Than Paradise
Adam Sachs’s recent article in T Magazine on Marin County, CA, “the most beautiful, bucolic, privileged, liberal, hippie-dippie place on the earth,” is worth a read. An excerpt: On the way around a dock we pass a line of big happy seals, bellies up in the sun. Some of the houseboats around here are repurposed […]
Zilia S?nchez at Artists Space
Artists Space‘s elegant retrospective of the too-little-known Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez is mesmerizing. From AS: Her paintings have regularly taken on a modular character, comprised of two or more abutting parts. This seriality has become a cornerstone of Sánchezâ??s work: she continues to rework and add to paintings begun as early as the 1970s, considering each […]
The World in the Curl
This summer Crown/Random House is publishing The World in the Curl a new book co-authored by Peter Westwick and Peter Neushul about the history of surfing. According to the press release: The thinking-person’s guide to surfing and the world it has created. Among the most popular courses at the University of California at Santa Barbara is […]
