The interplay of colors and contrasting directions endows the open spaces with their own specific movements. The entire composition is cropped cinematically to add implied drama to what can only be called a scene.

January 17-February 22, 2009 92 Plymouth Street, at Washington Street Brooklyn, NY, 718 834 8761 It is hard to imagine an installation looking better in the industrial Smack Mellon main exhibition hall than Kirsten Hassenfeld’s current installation, Dans La Lune. Smack Mellon is a venue of raw physicality, with towering concrete columns framed in industrial steel, … Continued

21 october 2008 – 4 january 2009 Galeries du quai 13, quai Malaquais, 75506 Paris Telephone: 01 47 03 50 00 Figures du corps was a rare insight into the archive of one of the most significant art schools in the world.  The anatomy collection of École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts de Paris is an … Continued

Naumann has had the courage and good taste to break the medium barrier between Hayter’s experiments in printmaking, drawing and painting by presenting his work chronologically, regardless of – and mixing up – medium and support.

The resulting hang is very refreshing, and vindicating, to those afficionados sick to the hind teeth of Hayter being dismissed as a “technical wizard” in the etching studio, and therefore not, by extension, a “real” artist outside of it.

When Mullican asserts in writing that the “preoccupation with materials and processes seems to clutter up the phenomenon of what interests me,” he is making it clear to us that no individual person or thing can contain the entirety of that which engages him. Thus the artist reworks appearances as a means of describing the gestalt that both energizes and evades his hand.

Quaytman works in a mode of painting/silkscreen hybrid, an at once middle-brow and mass-produced liminal form that is ideologically adrift between the elite and the unique in a way that recalls Warhol. The show quietly crackles with ideas about production; perception and legibility; the nature of the “image;” and the play between painterly and photographic values.

I’ve long felt that Peter Plagens and I had a community of interest, as we’ve both written about art for weekly newsmagazines (he for Newsweek, I for Time, having preceded Robert Hughes in that slot). Imagine my delight when I learned last August that Plagens was publishing his second novel, The Art Critic, in 24 installments on artnet! Twenty-four … Continued

Marcel Proust begins his novel In Search of Lost Time with a famously long passage in which the Narrator describes sleep, or more properly, the antics of his imagination, while semi-conscious. When I read this passage for the first time, the image that most struck me was that of the Narrator sitting in an armchair reading … Continued

Chelsea, New York gallery goers with an astute eye for furnishings will have picked up on the cult status of French mid-century modernist Jean Prouvé.  A vintage specimen of his legendary Potence lamp provides scant illumination and surreally displaced period charm to the very public back office at Sonnabend Gallery, for instance; a weatherworn school … Continued

Colin Laverty is a Sydney doctor, who, along with his wife Elizabeth, has amassed one of the most singular collections of recent and contemporary aboriginal art in Australia. This book documents the collection, containing clear, color-accurate reproductions, photographs of the landscapes in which particular artists work and some portraits. There are informed essays throughout. The … Continued