Mai-Thu Perret at David Kordansky

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"Féminaire consists primarily of two bodies of work: [...] figurative sculptures positioned on a single plinth and a gridded wall arrangement of dozens of ceramic wall pieces"
"Immediate physicality is also a defining feature of the ceramic wall works [...]"
"Beginning with uniform rectangular slabs, Perret uses her hands to distort the material into torqued, unpredictable shapes [...] interaction between the artist’s body and the clay that absorbs her actions."

Against the delicate humans reposed, a visceral deforming of material. The body torqued, crushed with fingerprint remnant, a single hole. The figures have guns. Buy whichever, the holed or gunned, you wish, people watching sublimated wounds happen.


See too: Mark Prent at Mitchell Algus, Mai-Thu Perret, Olivier Mosset at VnH

Marcelo Cipis at Spike

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The blurring of art and design produces an uncanny effect, seeing art airbrushed to a mannequin smoothness, an efficient body. Why isn’t all art this clear in desire, in its use. In design the auratic function is the product; the advert is the gears turning to produce the glow around it. Art is more of a dirty cloud that purports not to be, a ghost claiming it isn't.

Pieter Schoolwerth at Miguel Abreu

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Every gallery has that painter, the stylistically performative running the permutations of their look. They’re fun, fine, you could do far worse than Schoolwerth and the PR which, turgid, aptly describes the loss of your viewer-self within, metaphor for the free floating body that everyone everywhere is at pains to describe but not touch. So we’ll say it here, it hurts to touch nothing. So when looking at the coldness and feeling the stylistic chrome they contain know it’s a real possibility.

Mark Prent at Mitchell Algus

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Rarely blatant horror, the genre relegated to SFX and haunted basements. Thek's meat, or Bellmer's arrangements, Nauman, McCarthy, even Bosch or all those paintings of saints' martyrdoms, aren't as expressly, grotesquely, violently, there. Texas Chainsaw Massacre frowny face. But artists love violence, what painter hasn't cleaved a face with brushstroke. It's there, implicit in so much art, proving the bloodlust buried. But theatricality is coming back, Max Hooper Schneider or Ajay Kurian, so violence admitted maybe with it too, our hematophagic libidos.



Violence: Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, Michaël Borremans at Dallas Museum of Art, Jordan Wolfson at David Zwirner, Berlinde de Bruyckere at Hauser & Wirth, Andro Wekua at Sprüth Magers, Miriam Cahn at Meyer Riegger, Robert Longo at Metro Pictures, Tomoo Gokita at Taka Ishii, Michael E. Smith at Michael Benevento, Sam Durant at Praz-Delavallade & Vedovi, Erwin Wurm at Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Ajay Kurian at White Flag Projects

“Invisible Man” at Martos

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CAD has been bad for exhibitions like this which prize the Minimalist Friedian experience. The camera points at what should be foun, rendering the scavenger hunt null. It's instead pornographically there. The Invisible Man suddenly smeared across screens of America's resident body camera.

Darren Bader at Greenspon

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Bader's reduction of things to names, names converted to songs which share them, (Do you get it this makes them equitable in Bader's world) which songs all played at once orchestrate the cacophony of the world. The noise of things. Eyes delineate what ears cannot: if you converted the world to song, it would be just noise. How sad.  Like Creed's All the Bells, aesthetic considerations are subordinate to the rule of name, category: bells, all. Language becomes code allowing for slippage, treating things as their categories, there is no difference between burritos only the category, burrito, which makes the Kickstarter to help Darren Bader become Martin Creed doubly funny for both's categorical tomfoolery, under which two of the same thing can be one.


See too: Willem de Rooij at Arnolfini

Win McCarthy at Silberkuppe

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Mashing up some of the better artists of the last couple generations, pureed style, pulped assemblage and mulled into a new substance for casting your own likeness in.

Karla Black at Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens

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Candy coat the thing you need to swallow.

Past: Daniel Buren at Bortolami

"Of course Zobernig needs Buren as his hostage in order to remain in negotiations, and Buren's calm cool continuation despite it, still striping away, is sort of endearing if not insane."


Click here to read full Daniel Buren at Bortolami

Caleb Considine at Daniel Buchholz

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"This sense of content being astray has to do also with the process’ vying for significance."

Call the exhibition Clue. The puzzles of today's painting in which their individuated flat symbols present a real mystery of a subject. Looking like de Chirico designed a board game. Soviet Realism for the icon age, new devotional painting. Colonel Rublev in the museum with a candlestick.


Click these: Caleb Considine at Massimo de Carlo, Jutta Koether at Bortolami, Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zürich, Mathew Cerletty at Office Baroque, Annette Kelm at Meyer Kainer, Annette Kelm at Gio Marconi, Jesse Chapman at Algus Greenspon, Kaspar Müller at Federico Vavassori, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission, Jesse Benson at Michael Benevento, Venice: Victor Man at The Central Pavilion,  Group Show at Mary Mary, Gina Litherland at Corbett vs. Dempsey, Emily Mae Smith at Rodolphe Janssen, Milano Chow at Mary Mary, Leidy Churchman at Koelnischer Kunstverein, Allison Katz at Gio Marconi, Adriana Lara at Algus Greenspon

“Iron Lady” at Isabella Bortolozzi

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New perfume advertising with adult actress Stoya. Adverts edgy, too much for public consumption, moved to backrooms, our art galleries, which with ease adopting advertorial space that our art increasingly resembles. The designers, the photographer get credit, Symonds, Pearmain, Lebon, actress none, the intellectual labor we prize, the body we don't. Well Stoya likely got paid, classic capital. You can pay women for their nudity and they can pay you to be clothed, adorned with your scent. Fashion as the fantasy of men imagining women, men dressing women with their fantasy, fashion. Symonds fashion influenced by bondage.


see too: Stewart Uoo at 47 Canal

Hannah Black at MUMOK

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You may recall Black as penning the "urgent recommendation," destruction of Schutz's WhiBi painting, and subsequent firestorm of art-world hand wringing and giltedged-sanctioned rebuttals by figureheads such as Fusco and Rankine arguing the painting's worth as discussion catalyst seemingly not recognizing Black (and Bright's) request for painting bonfires seemed the real catalyst otherwise the art-world may have continued its merry silent way of soft congratulatory back patting and subsequent relief of white people self-affirming their feeling absolutely aghast at racism with a painting of it. 

In comparison to all that brute forcing a small frail show.

Cooper Jacoby at Freedman Fitzpatrick

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Apocalypse fabulous, death drive design for-your-home. Designer military, bio, and technologies. Fashionable. Heat sinks in beehives, or the pollinator wasps we'll use to replace them. Ham-handedry matters little with such sexiness; intentional: they're supposed to look like the high-end commodities that they are. An enviable press release reading like a lookbook for the rich's post-collapse homes. Our world's end, celebrate it with a commemorative lamp, luxury mirroring your wealth's participation in it.


See too: Cooper Jacoby at Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden

Robert Longo at Metro Pictures

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Everything of Longo's looks like a cock, looks like a giant rippling penis. Wet and brooding penises. Militarized dicks. Throbbing and stupid. Images of "power" drawn as massive black portenders. As "examinations of violence" they extrapolate out, reuse, clad their look in the same black garb of SWAT, to make you feel small. Mutate their humanitarian subjects into a threat with the Darth Vader aesthetic they purport to critique, Longo's assault drawings, men and their big scary black guns.

Steven Parrino at The Power Station

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The slick seductive surface of James Dean wrapping his vehicle around another thrown through glass, rolling across the pavement, the shiny waste of his wreckage, the waste of something beautiful. David Fincher. It’s cool to watch violence. Wet things across pavement. Entropic angst, saying no to dad and smoking indoors.  It feels anti-authoritarian to buy a leather jacket. It doesn’t matter that the jacket is pleather, it's that smoking indoors feels [fucking (ed.)] good.

Joyce Pensato at Friedrich Petzel

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 I mean a painting really needn't have that many drips. Pensato appears not so much flinging paint as some existential outpouring but against the dictum that one shouldn't fling it at all. [Even the most expressive of the expressionists was tempered by some masculinist higher order of capital P painting.] The outlandish resistant to the decorum expected of certain, uh, populations. Making them feminist, a big goofy face at your expectations of civility, protest.

"It’s the result of the schizo positioning of painting today, in which everyone wants a subjectivity expressed but no one wants human expression. The hysteric is the ability for the human to appear through the grate of order; social, relational, capital, or artistic."



See too: Joanne Greenbaum at Crone, Judith Bernstein at Studio Voltaire, Judith Bernstein at Mary Boone

Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Of which of course innuendo relies on social expectations. And so when you see a lumpy rocken form as a huge cock you are in part seeing its cultural conditioning that makes it so. The dirty mind sees the content of a culture that is present but subsurface. Some of the early "venuses" were barely human let alone women, yet we see the maternal. The lengths to which stretch it, how deep it runs. Man two spheres a tube, woman a bucket and curves.


See too: Lisa Yuskavage at Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis

Past: Mandla Reuter at Kunstverein Braunschweig

"A Fun house in which perception is amplified through ascetic rather than psychedelic terms..."



Click here to read full Mandla Reuter at Kunstverein Braunschweig

Gijs Milius at Gaudel de Stampa

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We try to make the body reappear and it appears as a cartoon, which we're mad about. Our cartoon bodies extrapolated from the growing prevalence of data and numbers domineering discussions of humans. The "broad picture" we use for governance. People as populations. Everything feels like a cartoon in this virtuality because you can do great violence to it. A million jobs lost, a million jobs gained. Tom whacks at Jerry with a mallet like an axe. Jerry distends.


see too: “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center, Sadie Benning at Susanne Vielmetter

Stephan Dillemuth at Künstlerhaus KM–

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You won't get far before authority directs you to Dillemuth's website. Which:
"The abundance of content on his website and the density of his films testify [...] to the possible prevalence of means over ends; the viewer/browser can be left with the feeling of entering the centre of a never-ending task of organisation." You'll never quite get closer to it, no matter how much you peer at the subject.

It's important to note our assemblage getting cleaner, bodies too.

Lucy Skaer at MRAC

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What jewelry does to its wearer, Skaer does to sculpture, attachments which offset the object, accessorize your sculpture. A good piece of jewelry loads the subject with meaning. A pearl necklace over breast, a man with a tramp stamp fetish, a single gold stud in the nose. These things load their subject. A pin stripe on a car, a chrome bumper, a piece of jade set into marble, vajazzaling its nude surface.


See too: Lucy Skaer at Murray Guy

Joan Jonas at Gavin Brown

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Without a central theme like spine running down the diasporic artists work generally leaves them relegated to some periphery. We like our artists to be about something, always circling their core. It makes it easier to consume. It is an odd trait of humans that we like to know what we will see prior to seeing it, well documented in film trailers, foretold plots, and increased ticket sales. As much as we like our artists to be "independent spirits" we also want to know them, have them under control. Joan Jonas isn't really like that, people continuously wondering why she hasn't got her due.

“2021” at Sydney

“2021” at Sydney

The decrepit and artifactual, pieces, there's something lovely forlorn about a single butt of trash like a rose. Good trash will bloom in the sun, wilt in the rain. We aspire to be like its emptiness, it vindicates our cities, we can see the whole world like a lens through the one discarded in the gutter. Trash reflects us, because we're better at deciphering ruins than cultures.


See too: Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center, Nancy Lupo at Kristina Kite & Yuji Agematsu at Miguel Abreu, “May the Bridges I Burn Light the Way” at STANDARD (OSLO)

Charline von Heyl at Capitain Petzel

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It was important that within the slurry of Post-war abstraction's melting of representation remained the church-like atmosphere from which western painting stemmed: devotional painting still. If von Heyl's is different it's because the paintings trade this devotional for the more transactional address of advertorial cymbal crashing, of images striking, with attack, no slurry but legibility, recognition, even if recognition is nonsense, abstraction, just that you see its information.


see too: Charline von Heyl at Gisela Capitain

Ann Craven at Southard Reid

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Suppose a sci-fi alternate history, post-war painting replaced with this. Ann Craven, Lily van der Stokker, Judith Bernstein, Nicola Tyson, cuteness of content, rather than flatness with swagger. Clementine Greenberg. Everyone really having said fuck the Bauhaus and everything was fluorescent and green. Not sure what difference can really be ascertained between Craven and Rothko really, besides the surrounding culture? What would have been the world then? Would Lisa Frank still be cool?

See too: Lily van der Stokker at Koenig & Clinton,  Katherine Bernhardt at Venus Over Manhattan, Richard Aldrich at Gladstone Gallery