Njideka Akunyili Crosby at Baltimore Museum of Art

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Perhaps too easy a statement that for Akunyili Crosby, like Kerry James Marshall, the patchwork assembling of visual cultures not necessarily the western canon and manifesting all the diaspora of it - Nigerian pop and pattern for AC; comics, movie posters, barbershops for KJM - feels less like the paintings trends of post-modern dicey-ness, less a Rosler war brought home than saturated by, felt lived in, warm. When the graphic face of a Nigerian minister comes roaring through collapsing space like a advert it seems less compositional than accurate to how time functions, we don't to keep attaching lead and weight to canvases to function for the weight of history.


see too: Kerry James Marshall at MOCA Los Angeles





by not necessarily being indebted to western canon

Sam Anderson at Rowhouse Project

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There is rarely an object of Anderson's we don't look down upon, that you don't watch where you step, a presentation whose, like early Wilkes or Aran's tables, dust settled marks this specific instance foreboding its wind, isolating its moment like Manders' cat at night cast in metaphorical bronze, or the Kelleyian arena which situates creatures (even while attacking its sentimentality) as an offering, like a little dog rolling over exposing belly's soft pink skin veiling easily destroyed guts, people we stand over, Perniceian vulnerability, an emotional connection to things that require our care.


See too: Cathy Wilkes at Kunstmuseum Linz, Cathy Wilkes at Tramway, Sam Anderson at Tanya Leighton, Sam Anderson at Off Vendome, Manfred Pernice at Galerie Neu, Manfred Pernice at Regen Projects

Ajay Kurian at Rowhouse Project

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Take a casino, and continue to supply power to it. With an insulation sprayer filled with soupy oatmeal, grass seed, and used band-aids in 40/40/10 mixture, spray in sporadic bursts over the interior. Turn to ON the produce misters piped into equal distribution throughout the casino's byzantine carpeted floor. Set the foggers on "Jungle." The aquariums should be clean. Open the amphibian cages, let loose several roombas. Animatronics from several Chuck-E-Cheeses should be stripped of their flesh and set in small pools of shallow water, still horrifically signing. When properly weighted the iPhones will levitate. Leave the faucets run. Scatter around the refuse of humanity. Allow ample wide fields of uncontrolled voltage to go unchecked from large gauge wires. Plug everything in. Lock the door and leave for 10 years. Upon the decade, proceed to cut up the architecture into small manageable sizes and distribute into white rooms of galleries over the entire continent to speak to the future. What is interesting is the names that these objects will fall under will have an endless micro-differentiation of aesthetics, have totally different meanings to them.

See too:  “Flat Neighbors” at Rachel Uffner, Hans-Christian Lotz at Christian Andersen,Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak, “RR ZZ” at Gluck50, Yuji Agematsu at Real Fine Arts, Mathis Altmann at Freedman Fitzpatrick Altmann, Olga Balema at Croy Nielsen, David Douard at Johan Berggren, Nancy Lupo at Wallspace, Katja Novitskova at Kunsthalle Lissabon, Anicka Yi at Cleveland Museum of Art, Transformer Station, Florian Germann at Gregor Staiger, Timur Si-Qin at Carl Kostyál, Ben Schumacher at Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, Anna Uddenberg and Nicolas Ceccaldi at MEGA Foundation,  Pamela Rosenkranz at Karma International, “Being Thing” at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage & Treignac Projet, Michael E. Smith at Sculpture Center

Albert Mertz at Freddy

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What is left of a Mertz painting?  Blue+red's arbitrary constant - chosen for its particular ugliness - leaves what? Puzzled faces, squares. Ryman or Buren and it's easy to say what we are looking at - everything but the color, everything but the stripes. Mertz it's hard to say. Its programmatic abundance of variables adds up to a wonderful arbitrariness, a sort of magical nothingness, a caffeine-free sugarless Coke.

Zak Kitnick at Rowhouse Project

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Kitnick in the wasteland of a collapsing distinction between commodities and art. Hamilton Beach trading in the same nebulous affects of today's semio-surrealism. The reptilian effects of consumer language, our love for art becomes indistinguishable from our love of products. The product, kin art, become its packaging: images as totems for desire. The objects conjure a semio-construct, and we do battle with a hypnotic ghost manifested. The affect is the object. Basically the point is Hamilton Beach, et al. have entered the field playing high level game of avant-garde animism that art is trying to catch up to, conjuring spectres of occult need. I'm not convinced speculative realism has anything helpful to offer art (philosophy another question) that couldn't be deduced from some post-baudrillard semio-construction that seems to have gotten away from us, playing upon us. Not from the objects themselves but a symptom of a market ecology. I don't even know what this packaged object is, but I desire it, a unique piece of trash.

See too Michael E. Smith at Lulu , Sophie Nys at Crac Alsace , "Paris de Noche" at Night Gallery , Pentti Monkkonen at High Art , Yuji Agematsu at Artspeak

Trevor Shimizu at Rowhouse Project

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Different than Josh Smith for whom production proves the product, Shimzu’s premised on paintings readymade product, that so long as it is painted, so long as it is painting, it is already done. Enjoying Shimzu’s poor materials because something is there, depicted, and that is enough, way more than most.

See too : Ann Craven at Comfort Moderne , Albert Oehlen at Skarstedt

Keith Mayerson at Freddy

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Mayerson isn’t going abstract. The paintings date over the last number years, mostly 2012, first exhibited together here, and as PR attests some were included in Whitney Biennial’s figure salon.
Mayerson’s proliferating archive of painted images - assiduously maintained on a personal website over a decade of work - swelling over the years, slow roaming among variations, genres, and means, and began pre-Instagram - Mayerson already ascertained the cheapness of the image, in which individuals were trumped by the accumulation and abutment of contents. Each image maintains a content modular in relation to its cohorts, here a full meltdown. An archive of cultural attenuation that, like the Biennial’s recent install, “a non-linear narrative we are asked to complete ourselves.” To become our own detectives of what the gooey form of what his “American Dream”, Mayerson’s, the son of a psychoanalyst, could mean, dripping like clocks, “to channel my subconscious into my paintings and make it ‘real,’” like seeing faces in the wood, like seeing the faces Mayerson sees, like what representational painting represents.

See too : Jana Euler at Kunsthalle Zurich , Jim Shaw at Metro Pictures

Nicholas Buffon at Freddy

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The world rendered in miniature, distant. The signs of the world arranged in a taxonomic grid. Prefiguring action of action figures, scenery in the play we project. MD -> NY, gallery direct. Painted with a teenage aestheticism, pizza handed in Guston gluttony, brushstrokes dragged like feet to get in the car. Distinct Joe Fig’s clever meta game of infinite cleanliness, instead touch rendered, Buffon’s empty streets, and human remnants find a sentimental blowing in the detritus, the world empty, ready for the world’s endless figurants. The facade of the gallery to imagine its inside, the inside everything out, synechode New York. I would like the police car action set please.