Claudia Comte, The Morphing Scallops (Installation View), via Gladstone

Marking the first exhibition dedicated solely to the painting practice of Claudia Comte, Gladstone Gallery’s current show of wall paintings arrives at a particularly ironic moment in American politics.  As the US government goes unfunded over a restrictive physical structure on its Southern border, the Swiss artist presents her works as coy investigations of physical limits, and the internal worlds that they make possible to express and elaborate. (more…)

Adam Pendleton, Untitled (code poem) (2016), via Public Art Fund

The Public Art Fund’s The Language of Things, inspired by Walter Benjamin’s 1916 essay On Language as Such and on the Language of Man, takes on a challenging prompt this summer, seeking to communicate with the public through works that utilize language and linguistic themes in one of the most congested and sonically dense spaces in the city, just outside of City Hall downtown.  Benjamin’s assertion that “there is no event or thing in either animate or inanimate nature that does not in some way partake in language” further deepens this show’s proposed dialogue, looking at complexities of language as a utilitarian, communicative tool, to emphasize Benjamin’s conclusion that “it is in the nature of each one to to communicate its mental contents.” (more…)