Thursday, August 29, 2019

Veit Laurent Kurz at Kunstverein Nürnberg


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Another anachronistic period aesthetics misremembered, like retrofuturism, or steampunk. Call this look post-apocalypse primeval. Cosplay nostalgia for time that was not. Steampunk stuck to a future built clinging to the Cartesian, mechanistic, rationally enlightened gentlemen, comforting against the opacity of neoliberal globalism, market algorithms, and subprime CDOs that no one understood until collapse. Then it made sense that at some point sci-fi and Apple commercials began setting their products in lush green forests, envisioning the technology so advanced it appeared natural, magic, indistinguishable; today: Artisanal baguettes and iPhones.


see too: “S.O.A.P.Y. III” at What Pipeline

AR: Diamond Stingily at Wattis


Artist: Diamond Stingily
Venue: Wattis
Exhibition Title: Doing the Best I Can
Originally Posted: September 15th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.


Tuesday, August 27, 2019

AR: Charline von Heyl at Petzel


Artist: Charline von Heyl
Venue: Petzel, New York
Exhibition Title: New Work
Originally Posted: September 21st, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Past: Nora Schultz
Jury-rigging's nautical roots - in the provisional lashing of temporary mast and sails - before the term basically come to mean any unsightly but workable solution to a problem - has a particular relevance to Schultz whose early misuse of materials to create impromptu painting machines involved lots of rigging awkward solutions to the problems of needing to produce a painting to achieve that sort of elegance captured by outsider architecture, redneck repairs, and the whole meme of "if it look stupid but it works, it ain't stupid" captured by the internet, thematizing the absurdity of the problem's demands as a whole to begin with and then with further inelegant metal solutions to sculpture as horrendous jagged objects, the term is often malpropoed with "jerry-built" but not to be confused with the definition of "built unsubstantially of bad materials; built to sell but not last."


Nora Schultz at dépendance
Nora Schultz at Reena Spaulings

Monday, August 26, 2019

Past: John Armleder

"Everyone loves the smell of their own brand, and the miasmia wafts in with a laugh of its aesthetic impropriety. Like a fart joke. The bastardization of the proper. Stray paint and design faux-pas.  Paintings which look the way "oopsie" sounds. Whether or not anyone else loves is it in relation to how deeply trapped they are with it. Fart aesthetics in the high speech."

read full: Group Show at David KordanskyJohn Armleder at Fernand Léger Foundation

Sunday, August 25, 2019

AR: Raúl de Nieves at Freedman Fitzpatrick


Artist: Raúl de Nieves
Venue: Freedman Fitzpatrick, Los Angeles
Exhibition Title: The Guide
Originally Posted: October 31st, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Friday, August 23, 2019

AR: Gili Tal at Cabinet

Artist: Gili Tal
Venue: Cabinet, London
Exhibition Title: Civic Virtues
Originally Posted: November 9th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Group Show at Nagel Draxler


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This is what 10 years ago looked like.

Wednesday, August 21, 2019

Anna Zacharoff at Kantine

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PR: "Some might say that a dollhouse is an expression of scale. It is a domestic monument and an architecture of absolute control."

Which CAWD previously: "So artistic turns to dolls and miniatures and virtuality makes symptomatic sense: an expression of a need for control over a world we increasingly do not. There is a dissonance between our interior worlds which we find virtual and beholden to our godlike control of a drag/drop materiality conjuring sex in our glass or products from its depths. Digital desires that the physical world increasingly doesn't reflect. The model allows the physical world marionette to an invisible hand in which we trust."

"The Model becomes predominate as the world's point of scale becomes unmoored, and reality floating between the virtual and material conditions abstracted by floating points of enumeration etc. etc. The model encapsulates this world governed by virtual features, the planning, projected statistical everything, abstraction of everyday. Looking down at our hands the sphere of the earth is said to be at our fingertips. This abstraction feels lived in."

There is here though a clever inversion with the documentation, which turns the virtual plane, model, CAD, into an ouroboros en abyme. We float. We all float in here.


See to: Mathis Altmann at Halle für Kunst LüneburgMathis Altmann at Freedman FitzpatrickGina Folly at Ermes-Ermes

Tuesday, August 20, 2019

Lois Dodd at Modern Art


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Plainness feels like the fresh air it ostensibly depicts. A lightness. More like drawing. These paintings would have been passé 10 years ago's theoretics and assemblage, but some anachronism has happened. The world, its viewing, is already surreal enough. Even the world feels strange, tender.

Sunday, August 18, 2019

Alia Farid at Portikus


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Monuments to our plastic shackles, lifelines, supplying water and indenturing us to its machine. Where we were once attached to rivers, springs, we are not attached to some global complex. Like the "Plastics make it possible" ad campaigns, a journey through time, cast in plastic. Deeply ironic, no? Isn't the world itself a monument to plastic, and covered in it. Not entirely sure why we now monumentalize our pain, but art seems to enjoy masochism, it is "critical."

Friday, August 16, 2019

AR: Ghislaine Leung at Chisenhale

Artist: Ghislaine Leung
Venue: Chisenhale, London
Exhibition Title: Constitution
Originally Posted: March 28th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Thursday, August 15, 2019

AR: Ser Serpas at LUMA Westbau

Artist: Ser Serpas
Venue: Truth and Consequences, Geneva
Originally Posted: August 10th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.
Past: Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main

"...his astro-turf so in demand they were "at times delivered to the galleries in huge rolls and sold to collectors by the yard."  What was it making an industrial mockery of the land so desirous to the rich. Was it death-drive chic, or did we think then it so fantastical the notion of artificial earth, or were we starry eyed over the possibility: the earth produced on rolls by the yard, or at least something imitating it..."


read full: Piero Gilardi at Frankfurt Am Main

Nick Oberthaler at Emanuel Layr

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The cartoon infects everything, including our signscapes, their assertion, commands that knead the world with stern minimalism. "a general tool for rudimentary signalling and identification" and turning us all into vexillologists at their askew version.

Wednesday, August 14, 2019

AR: Jana Euler at Galerie Neu

Artist: Jana Euler
Venue: Galerie Neu, Berlin
Exhibition Title: Great White Fear
Originally Posted: May 13th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Monday, August 12, 2019

AR: Fernanda Gomes at Museo Jumex


Artist: Fernanda Gomes
Venue: Museo Jumex, Mexico City
Originally Posted: October 10th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Sunday, August 11, 2019

AR: Yuji Agematsu at Lulu

Artist: Yuji Agematsu
Venue: Lulu, Mexico City
Exhibition Title: Mexico City: April 1 to 13, 2019
Originally Posted: June 24th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

AR: Kathryn Andrews at KÖNIG GALERIE

Artist: Kathryn Andrews
Venue: KÖNIG GALERIE, Berlin
Exhibition Title: Circus Empire
Originally Posted: July 8th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Thursday, August 8, 2019

AR: Yuki Kimura at Jenny’s


Artist: Yuki Kimura
Venue: Jenny’s, Los Angeles
Exhibition Title: Reflecting in Sizes
Originally Posted: May 8th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Tuesday, August 6, 2019

Wolfgang Tillmans at Maureen Paley


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Perhaps what's at stake in the "blushes" is prettiness, an offhand nicety whose cheapness and disposability Tillmans weights against all the other offhand "cheap" snapshots of humans about their lives. Placing stake that you cannot dispose the saccharine abstraction without throwing out the people, humans. "If one thing matters, everything matters." And so they are like sunsets, both the near endless regurgitations of saccharine accident, cliche. Incidental returns of arbitrary conditions, completely unique and, like people, endlessly the same. A triple-point of beauty, arbitrariness, meaning. And perhaps meaning, our affection for the blushes, only appears as ward against inversion: If even one doesn't matter, nothing matters. Our fear.

AR: D’Ette Nogle at Bodega

Artist: D’Ette Nogle
Venue: Bodega, New York
Exhibition Title: Bleeding Canvas
Originally Posted: April 18th, 2019
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Monday, August 5, 2019

AR: Morag Keil at Project Native Informant

Artist: Morag Keil
Venue: Project Native Informant, London
Exhibition Title: Here We Go Again
Originally Posted: September 10th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.

Sunday, August 4, 2019

AR: Joëlle Tuerlinckx at Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage

Artist: Joëlle Tuerlinckx
Venue: Centre International d’Arte et du Paysage, Beaumont-du-Lac
Exhibition Title: The Constellation of Maybe
Originally Posted: August 5th, 2018
Note: This entry is part of August Review, our annual look back at this season’s key exhibitions. For more information, see the announcement here.