John Waters, Beverly Hills John (2012)

Marianne Boesky Gallery is hosting its third collaboration with John Waters, a pioneer of American camp and “trash culture” since the 1970’s, particularly through his feature breakthrough Pink Flamingos in 1972.  Throughout his career, Waters has constantly redefined the elements that constitute American culture, at a time when the nation was premature to notions such as homosexuality or kitsch, and used these often marginalized cultures within a studied cinematic and artistic framework.

John Waters, Still from Kiddie Flamingos (2014) Read More »

Polly Apfelbaum, HWP 10-20 (2014), via Art Observed

The White Columns Annual offers a particularly resonant opening note for New York’s art world each year.  Refusing an overly objective approach to the curation of a “year in review” style group show, the event encourages, and even emphasizes subjectivity, turning the keys over to one group or person each year.  This year, the all-female art collective Cleopatra’s has been handed the reigns for the Annual’s 9th Edition, with the end result being a colorful, expansive show that is at turns somber, wry and compelling. Read More »

Danh Vo, Your mother sucks cocks in Hell (2015), all images courtesy the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery

Vietnamese-born Danish artist Danh Vo and his family fled Vietnam in a homemade wooden boat a few years after the Communists’ victory, when Vo was just four. In his current exhibition, “Homosapiens,” at Marian Goodman London, as in much of his body of work, the intersection of the historical and the personal is explored through artifacts, documents, and photographs—fragments, begging for the viewer to find their context, that bring into question the nature of identity and belonging. Read More »

Gillian Wearing, Me As an Artist in 1984 (2014), all Photos Courtesy of Regen Projects Los Angeles.

One of the most prominent members of the Young British Artists, Gillian Wearing, who in the past few decades has established a unique and enduring voice in the contemporary discourse, is presenting her new body of work at Los Angeles’ Regen Projects. The artist’s fourth collaboration with the gallery, everyone, features two new video pieces as well as various multimedia works that juxtapose Wearing’s investigations on personal memory, confrontation with past and unfolding of angst as a direct result. Read More »

Diana Thater, Science, Fiction (2014), via Art Observed

Diana Thater’s new exhibition on view at David Zwirner’s 19th Street Exhibition is an exercise in restraint.  Consisting of a pair of video compositions and a monumental structure in a light-saturated installation piece, the artist moves towards an experience of space, both in an immediate and more figurative sense, that engages the magnitude of human experience on both macro and micro scales. Read More »

Egon Schiele, Death and Maiden (1915), via Kunsthaus Zurich

The Kunsthaus Zürich is currently presenting a historical study in portraiture and figuration over the course of a century, comparing the output of Austrian painter Egon Schiele with YBA-affiliated painter Jenny Saville, and tying together the pair’s varying approaches to powerful and, at times, visceral depictions of the human body.  Culling works from across the expanse of both artist’s careers, the exhibition seems to function both as a pair of parallel historical studies in each artist’s inspirations and development, while allowing a certain degree of overlap and cross-referencing into the various techniques each artist employed. Read More »

Mary Weatherford, La Noche (2014), via Art Observed

The Museum of Modern Art’s highly anticipated exhibition of contemporary painting, curated by Laura Hoptman, presents a cursory survey of current trends in this ever-evolving medium. Taking the concept of nonlinear time as its conceptual crux, The Forever Now: Contemporary Painting in an Atemporal World attempts to parse the impact that the daily experience of digital media has had on painting specifically, and on visual culture more broadly.  Read More »

Henri Matisse, The Snail (1953), via Art Observed

There’s a moment at the end of Henri Matisse’s landmark exhibition of his late “cut-out” works, currently on view at MoMA in New York, when the viewer emerges into the last room to view Matisse’s final canvases, immense explosions of color and form that immediately arrest the viewer with their dynamic, minimal surfaces. Read More »