Kirsten Pieroth at Mathew

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Residuals, remains, ashes, essence, marks, history, artifact. Your own level of animism denies or allows belief in encoding memory into objects. Or be like an On Kawara painting, encapsulating the object by presenting its ghost. Our fingerprints are ours, but we cannot be created from them. We leave traces, deformations in the world in our shape. At the end, ashes; perhaps your name scratched in history, or a hint of your face in a generation of children, offspring who are getting the residuals. But the object is gone, and like all behaved conceptual art there is a story.

Louisa Gagliardi at Open Forum

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Painting has body but ink has that sheen perfect in fashion, surfaces whose shapelies have been excavated until mere skeletons hanging clothes and skin to glow. That like Gagliardi's paintings the body cut for their tubular photoshop skin, cartoon mirroring our model's own el Grecoing bodies into lanky warbling sticks, printed in advert sweat, inks, magazine glass. That wet look, pavement in the rain under sodium streetlamps, inky, in the surfaces where even the lighting appears moisturized. Painting adopts different vernaculars, TOM FORD FOR MEN, appearing new.  A whole exhibition today called PVC fetishism - that the youthful today, raised in glass-inflected magazines, slick cartoons, feed though plastic, eventually adopt affinities for that torrent of slickness, we start to print our dreams on vinyl.


see too: Tony Conrad's Glass, Olga Balema at High Art, Olga Balema at High Art (2), Nicola Tyson at Friedrich Petzel, “Puddle, pothole, portal” at Sculpture Center,

Trisha Donnelly at Eva Presenhuber

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Not quite the Ian Rosen whole-in-one, you can find more images on Presenhuber's website But Donnelly has made a career of limiting the availability of the document that feeds the current apparatus of art, instead corned into an esoterica through regulation, the Donnelly mythos floats on the inability to know, though even see actually seeing them never helped answer anything, the nebulous otherworld aesthetic that like H.R. Giger channeled an techno/medical aesthetic for a decade before finding in the Alien its embodiment that Donnelly refuses, a ghost.


See too: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig, Ian Rosen at The Finley

Past: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig


"...abolish the possibility of a reference we can call common, bury it behind opaque markers. i.e. difficult to recount without resorting to the degrading telephone game of myth, scattered primary source quotes cut/pasted ad infinitum; the PR limbo bending backwards to avoid description, replaced with chimes; and objects which, even at peak banality aren't really describable without metaphor, some sorta whatsa type a deal. What you see isn't mine. Probably why there's such radical opinion difference, Donnelly's cult and the mudslingers. The inability to derive equitable terms, a reference to talk about, looking like slack-jawed yokels."


Click: Trisha Donnelly at Museum Ludwig

Huma Bhabha at Clearing

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"often invoking the artifacts of art-history and civilization in primal, otherworldly forms. Huma Bhabha’s haunting figures can be viewed as a 21st century hybrid of ancient statuary and contemporary sculpture, while other works explore the poetics of abandoned and scavenged material" is perhaps one of the most honest depictions of our belief in sculpture's totemization of the art and the mystique of the runic object, stonehengification, perceiving a purpose we infer but cannot see, a culture that exists but denied to know to pour all our assumptions in big rocks.

Faith Ringgold at Weiss Berlin

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2016, MoMA finally purchased their big Ringgold - of her 14 works perusable online, the first non multiple or tiny drawing- but then there exists not a single Gee's Bend quilt-maker, a tragedy like many at MoMA, as collections everywhere glacially and retroactively update their ideology to reflect today's culture and sculpture as Chauvinist Painting melts away and the body is allowed to have touched the things we hang on walls as if it had always been so. MoMA no longer leading culture, its dinosaur cruiseship seeming to lag ever further toward falling over the cultural world's edge. There are quilts in MoMA's collection, almost entirely by men - most notably Rauschenberg's paint splattered Bed using one as some found artifact worthy of covering in his vital fluid - showcasing its endless aversion to maternal labor as opposed to quilting itself. Notably of Ringgold's it was not a quilt that MoMA bought but an oil painting.


see too: Susan Cianciolo at Modern Art, Jessi Reaves at Bridget Donahue

“Fantasy is a place where it rains” at Fanta Spazio

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Framed to the architecture rather than aligned to the artworks the document appears as looking off into some middle distance, gazing longingly out, some sea out there. The photograph looking at nothing in particular embodies your own moments interiorly lost and stuporous, half-smile leaking under your unfocused eyes, capturing all the air and aura of the gallery like a wreath.