Past: Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia, Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission


"In the smoke of Matias Faldbakken's rocketship ascendancy the artworld was left blind scrambling to adhere a politic for it, to make a critical foundation for the artworld's hot new power iconography, unable to accept that how it looked, rather than any little content it contained, was its appeal." "Issues of interest for Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda, artists for whom the making compositions of all but a few remains generated a enormous look of power."
Click here to read full Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda at Francesca Pia
Click here to read full Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at 356 Mission

Dadamaino at Mendes Wood DM

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Looking back now you have to imagine life was, if not hell, at least a brutal minefield for women of the era who, free of a patriarchal home, were paroled to experience the full trauma of a world of men, those sexually "liberated" of the artworld excusing discomfort as "no major offense," the assaulters still allowed their sexual plumage to hang out openly in museums, forced to dodge big pendulous egos swung to wide berths, the male surety allowing the Greenberg-likes to steamroll the scene almost on machismo alone, to allow Judd to state as an entire thought about Anne Truitt in Art International: "She doesn't have a clear idea of what she is doing though," - that's it that's Judd's entire sentence - the defense of which is simply Judd was this much of a prick to everyone, and maybe Italy was kinder, less of the implicit patriarchal rules for gender so pervasive you still hear a generation occasionally defend as "natural," and within this then to somehow find some small elbowed room to make something soft.  Only to have echoing in your head Judd's castigation of Frankenthaler: "Frankenthaler's softness is fine but it would be more profound if it was also hard."


See too: Hannah Black at MUMOK

Past: Sarah Lucas

" The dirty mind sees the content of a culture that is present but subsurface. Some 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."


Click for full: Sarah Lucas at CFA Berlin

Past: Sylvie Fleury

“Fleury suggests art can be liberated from its reliance on constant innovation and complex physical formulation and relax instead into a sort of ne plus ultra of laissez faire “whateverism” which ups the ante on American “Slacker” culture’s aesthetics of resignation.”
-Adrian Dannatt

 Sylvie Fleury at Karma International

Eloise Hawser at Somerset House

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Plumbing the depths, the correlation between waterways and our most technically advanced medical imaging, the ability to peer under surfaces and into our sewage systems you and me. The human body is indistinguishable from any sufficiently complex sewer. The metaphorical transpositional points are numerous, we're all just bodies of water with structural needs to remove waste through complex veinous systems, and the methods of mapping those bodies mirror each other somewhat as tubed networks. "This will be the first time phantoms, a crucial part of modern medical practice, will be shown in a creative setting" seems like an oddly specific Guinness World Record, but a preliminary search through Leckey's Universal Addressibility of Dumb Things and Kelley's Uncanny shows it maybe technically correct if beside the point in a long history or alternative figuration. The long symbiotic history of medical and artistic representations, artists interest in them. Why did Simone Ambrogio come back, what are these medical professionals really up to? The difference in interest may be instead of the representations is how the representations are made here, flaunting the medical science it remains at least somewhat disconcerted with, the new means of figuration, your body like a toilet.


See too: Quintessa Matranga at Freddy, Yngve Holen at Fine Arts, Sydney

Past: J. Parker Valentine

"expectations of legibility depictive of some tip-of-the-tongue subject within a library of means detailing the amorphous thing it circles but fails to produce. There is the lure of subject object, the thing that will at any moment manifest itself in the definitive lines of drawing"

J. Parker Valentine at Juan and Patricia Vergez Collection, J. Parker Valentine at Park View

Autumn Ramsey at Crèvecoeur

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The decorative embellishments adorning the subject like Christmas tree, a structure for the hanging of means, that while Moreau's wreaths of ornamental doodadery shimmer with objects and riches, Ramsey's warble with the various means of representing those objects, the paint itself.  Us again gathered around the yule pine's glow, decoration, at an object that has more or less lost its meaning to act the tradition itself, history painting glitz.