Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Puncturing the vertiginous pace of New York life is the poetic silence of the Doris Salcedo retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The Colombian sculptor’s works address violence and are renowned worldwide as sites of collective mourning and reflection. The technical virtuosity of her installations make a retrospective nothing less than a herculean task, bravely undertaken in this case by the organizing institution, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (MCA), and co-curated by Pritzker Director Madeleine Grynsztejn and curator Julie Rodrigues Widholm. The exhibition consists of ten installations that span Salcedo’s thirty-year practice, viewable on the MCA’s website… Full Review

In his first major exhibition in the United States, Egyptian artist Wael Shawky (b. 1971) presented three elaborate films featuring fantastical marionettes performing Amin Maalouf’s The Crusades through Arab Eyes (1983), a book originally written in French but here translated into classical Arabic. Following the exhibition layout at MoMA PS1, viewers first encountered the production materials—sketches, sets, and the marvelous puppets—before entering the darkened screening rooms. The films were not simply synthetic narrative entertainment, but highly constructed performances, and viewers possessed an intimate knowledge of how they were made. Part of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) wider push to… Full Review

Of all the characters passed down from Giorgio Vasari’s Vite, it is Piero di Cosimo perhaps more than any other who came to embody the belief widely held in the Renaissance that art imitates life. What is known of his biography is remarkably sparse, apart from the stories Vasari gleaned as a young apprentice in the workshop of Andrea del Sarto, once a pupil of the eccentric master. Born in 1462, Piero was actually the son of Lorenzo d’Antonio, not a goldsmith (as Vasari would have it) but a succhiellinaio, or blacksmith. Throughout his career, Piero held an… Full Review

Mark Bradford’s solo exhibition, Scorched Earth, curated by Connie Butler at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, included twelve paintings, a mural, and a sound installation. Scorched Earth was tough and admirably far-reaching. Exquisitely detailed, the paintings evoked pain and violence. They looked inward and back, and they were surprisingly aqueous. Three haunting, untitled, twelve-foot-by-twelve-foot, black-and-white, unstretched canvases in a low-lit section of a gallery at the Hammer suggested dusky rivers and abrupt stops where Bradford accumulated, stained, and resisted staining by laying on and pulling away wet paper. One of Bradford’s signature text paintings seemed like a… Full Review

Philippe Parreno’s exhibition H {N)Y P N(Y} OSIS at the Park Avenue Armory offered New Yorkers a comprehensive view of a practice that has, since the 1980s, used cinematic and scenographic devices to merge art and reality. Building on his recent retrospective at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the installation construed the cavernous Armory space as a “street” lined with twenty-six of Parreno’s characteristic lightbulb marquees, and culminated in a set of bleachers that rotated to face three suspended screens. Onto these were projected four films made since 2000: Anywhere Out of the World (2000); June 8, 1968 (2009)… Full Review

The exhibition Habsburg Splendor: Masterpieces from Vienna’s Imperial Collections at the Kunsthistorisches Museum (KHM) is the result of collaboration among the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the KHM in Vienna. The show contained nearly one hundred paintings and artifacts that illustrated the development of courtly patronage and representation over the course of more than half a millennium. Curated by Monica Kurzel-Runtscheiner, the exhibition took a broad multidisciplinary approach that focuses on the history of the imperial family and the range of visual and figural media used… Full Review

International Pop recounts the emergence of Pop art from the 1950s through the early 1970s and takes a global approach to a phenomenon, which in its various iterations, responded critically and imaginatively to radical cultural and political currents. By including art across media and produced by artists associated with movements that originated in Europe, Asia, and North and South America, the show aims to broaden the scope of what previous exhibitions and prevailing scholarship have conceived of as “Pop.” These comparisons and confrontations reveal the myriad ways in which international artists deployed strategies and aesthetic modalities that alternately coincided with… Full Review

ZERO: Countdown to Tomorrow, 1950s–60s, curated by Valerie Hillings, provides the first opportunity in over fifty years for an American audience to take in the diverse array of experimental artistic practices developed across the international ZERO network. While Zero may initially bring to mind the German triumvirate of Heinz Mack, Otto Piene, and Günther Uecker, Hillings situates their experiments in an expansive community of peers and makes visible their sources of inspiration. Exhibition history provides the logic both for assembling this particular grouping of artists and for several of Hillings’s installation strategies, which seek to recreate the original experience… Full Review

Containing nearly 160 artworks, the exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa explores what it means to be “Senufo,” a term describing some of the peoples, languages, and cultures in northern Côte d’Ivoire, southern Mali, and Burkina Faso. It also questions the canonical assumptions applied by many academics and culture brokers to the definition and underlying parameters of Senufo art, culture, and identity. In challenging the long-disputed but tenaciously enduring belief in the “one tribe, one style” model of conceptualizing traditional African art, this exhibition and catalogue embody a more expansive view of Senufo culture that can stand as… Full Review

The exhibition Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White is as spare and elegant as the painting it celebrates. It presents James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, isolated on a deep grey wall. Quotes from the eminently quotable Whistler and his critics punctuate adjacent walls, as does a copy of the artist’s etching Black Lion Wharf (1859), identified as the framed print in the portrait’s background. The simple installation hews to the painting’s logic, for as Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London… Full Review