August Review Index 2019

“Magic Ben Big Boy” at Matthew Marks

Pati Hill at Essex Street

Joëlle Tuerlinckx at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage

Morag Keil at Project Native Informant

D’Ette Nogle at Bodega

Yuki Kimura at Jenny’s

Kathryn Andrews at KÖNIG GALERIE

Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale

Gili Tal at Cabinet

Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Charline von Heyl at Petzel

Diamond Stingily at Wattis

Group Show at Tanya Bonakdar

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Odd a press release for an exhibition titled "Living in a Lightbulb" would fail to mention Mcluhan's thoughts on lightbulbs, that the "electric light is pure information. It is a medium without a message." And now the exhibition on CAD displaying these lights, our lightbulb.

Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg

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Another anachronistic period aesthetics misremembered, like retrofuturism, or steampunk. Call this look post-apocalypse primeval. Cosplay nostalgia for time that was not. Steampunk stuck to a future built clinging to the Cartesian, mechanistic, rationally enlightened gentlemen, comforting against the opacity of neoliberal globalism, market algorithms, and subprime CDOs that no one understood until collapse. Then it made sense that at some point sci-fi and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones.


see too: “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline

AR: Diamond Stingily at Wattis

Artist: Diamond Stingily

Venue: Wattis

Exhibition Title: Doing the Best I Can

Click here to read

Originally Posted: September 15th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Charline von Heyl at Petzel

Artist: Charline von Heyl

Venue: Petzel, New York

Exhibition Title: New Work

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Originally Posted: September 21st, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Past: Nora Schultz
Jury-rigging's nautical roots - in the provisional lashing of temporary mast and sails - before the term basically come to mean any unsightly but workable solution to a problem - has a particular relevance to Schultz whose early misuse of materials to create impromptu painting machines involved lots of rigging awkward solutions to the problems of needing to produce a painting to achieve that sort of elegance captured by outsider architecture, redneck repairs, and the whole meme of "if it look stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" captured by the internet, thematizing the absurdity of the problem's demands as a whole to begin with and then with further inelegant metal solutions to sculpture as horrendous jagged objects, the term is often malpropoed with "jerry-built" but not to be confused with the definition of "built unsubstantially of bad materials; built to sell but not last."


Nora Schultz at dépendance
Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

AR: Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick

Artist: Raúl de Nieves

Venue: Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: The Guide

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Originally Posted: October 31st, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Gili Tal at Cabinet

Artist: Gili Tal

Venue: Cabinet, London

Exhibition Title: Civic Virtues

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Originally Posted: November 9th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Group Show at Nagel Draxler

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This is what 10 years ago looked like.

Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

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PR: "Some might say that a dollhouse is an expression of scale. It is a domestic monument and an architecture of absolute control."

Which CAWD previously: "So artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or products from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust."

"The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in."

There is here though a clever inversion with the documentation, which turns the virtual plane, model, CAD, into an ouroboros en abyme. We float. We all float in here.


See to: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst Lüneburg, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick, Gina Folly at Ermes-Ermes, 

Lois Dodd at Modern Art

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Plainness feels like the fresh air it ostensibly depicts. A lightness. More like drawing. These paintings would have been passé 10 years ago's theoretics and assemblage, but some anachronism has happened. The world, its viewing, is already surreal enough. Even the world feels strange, tender.

Alia Farid at Portikus

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Monuments to our plastic shackles, lifelines, supplying water and indenturing us to its machine. Where we were once attached to rivers, springs, we are not attached to some global complex. Like the "Plastics make it possible" ad campaigns, a journey through time, cast in plastic. Deeply ironic, no? Isn't the world itself a monument to plastic, and covered in it. Not entirely sure why we now monumentalize our pain, but art seems to enjoy masochism, it is "critical."

AR: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale

Artist: Ghislaine Leung

Venue: Chisenhale, London

Exhibition Title: Constitution

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Originally Posted: March 28th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Artist: Ser Serpas

Venue: Truth and Consequences, Geneva

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Originally Posted: August 10th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Past: Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main

"...his astro-turf so in demand they were "at times delivered to the galleries in huge rolls and sold to collectors by the yard."  What was it making an industrial mockery of the land so desirous to the rich. Was it death-drive chic, or did we think then it so fantastical the notion of artificial earth, or were we starry eyed over the possibility: the earth produced on rolls by the yard, or at least something imitating it..."


read full: Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main

Nick Oberthaler at Emanuel Layr

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The cartoon infects everything, including our signscapes, their assertion, commands that knead the world with stern minimalism. "a general tool for rudimentary signalling and identification" and turning us all into vexillologists at their askew version.

AR: Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

Artist: Jana Euler

Venue: Galerie Neu, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Great White Fear

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Originally Posted: May 13th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex

Artist: Fernanda Gomes

Venue: Museo Jumex, Mexico City

Click here to view slideshow

Originally Posted: October 10th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Artist: Yuji Agematsu

Venue: Lulu, Mexico City

Exhibition Title: Mexico City: April 1 to 13, 2019

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Originally Posted: June 24th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Kathryn Andrews at KÖNIG GALERIE

Artist: Kathryn Andrews

Venue: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin

Exhibition Title: Circus Empire

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Originally Posted: July 8th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Yuki Kimura at Jenny’s

Artist: Yuki Kimura

Venue: Jenny’s, Los Angeles

Exhibition Title: Reflecting in Sizes

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Originally Posted: May 8th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley

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Perhaps what's at stake in the "blushes" is prettiness, an offhand nicety whose cheapness and disposability Tillmans weights against all the other offhand "cheap" snapshots of humans about their lives. Placing stake that you cannot dispose the saccharine abstraction without throwing out the people, humans. "If one thing matters, everything matters." And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and, like people, endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear.

AR: D’Ette Nogle at Bodega

Artist: D’Ette Nogle

Venue: Bodega, New York

Exhibition Title: Bleeding Canvas

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Originally Posted: April 18th, 2019

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant

Artist: Morag Keil

Venue: Project Native Informant, London

Exhibition Title: Here We Go Again

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Originally Posted: September 10th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Joëlle Tuerlinckx at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage

Artist: Joëlle Tuerlinckx

Venue: Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage, Beaumont-du-Lac

Exhibition Title: The Constellation of Maybe

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Originally Posted: August 5th, 2018

Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.