February 13, 2017 Look Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin By Dan Piepenbring “Temple Tomb Fortress Ruin,” an exhibition of paintings by John Wellington, is at the Lodge Gallery through March 5. Wellington embraces the formal tactics of the old masters to depict a bleak, surreal, new world order—seemingly both ancient and modern, Eastern and Western—animated above all by a kind of perverted militarism. His work fixates, as his gallery writes, on “lost worlds, passing empires, false prophets, unlikely heroes, and the allure of idolatry.” John Wellington, You and Me, 2009, oil and copper leaf on aluminum, 68″ x 48″. Read More
February 9, 2017 Look Portraits and Perennials By Dan Piepenbring “Portraits & Perennials,” an exhibition of paintings and works on paper by Robert Kushner, opens tonight at DC Moore Gallery, where it’s on display through March 18. In an essay accompanying the exhibition catalog, “Do REAL Men Paint Flowers?”, Kushner writes, “So, are geometry and botany at peace? In dialogue? At each other’s throats? I would like to think that when I am done after working on it for weeks and sometimes months, there is an interesting and intentionally confusing juxtaposition between pure abstraction and linear form—that they each balance one another and create their own tightrope act.” Robert Kushner, Taro Leaves, 2016, acrylic, gold leaf, and collage on paper, 49″ x 33 1/2″. Read More
February 6, 2017 Look I’m Glad We Had This Conversation By Dan Piepenbring “I’m Glad We Had This Conversation,” an exhibition of paintings by David Humphrey, is at Fredericks & Freiser Gallery through February 25. “I like the patched-together quality,” he told Hyperallergic in 2014. “That is what it’s like to be a person in the world. We evolve out of dependencies and contexts. We are, in some ways, patch jobs: fragments that constitute a whole with some effort. There is an echo of that theme in the painting language, the means. I am always trying to pulverize the image. I like the idea that the painting is at risk of falling apart.” David Humphrey, Woodsman, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 80″ x 96″. Read More
January 30, 2017 Look Number Twenty-Four By Dan Piepenbring “#24,” an exhibition of paintings by Rebecca Morris, is showing through February 25 at Mary Boone Gallery. Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#01–15), 2015, oil on canvas, 95″ x 95″. Read More
January 30, 2017 Look Aubrey, Illustrated By Lucas Adams Last November, New York Review Books published Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. Aubrey, who died in 1697, is remembered for his Brief Lives, a collection of short biographies with a candor and color that enlarged the possibilities of the genre. Scurr has assembled an “autobiography” for Aubrey from remnants of his letters, manuscripts, and books, setting his sensitivities against the turmoil of Restoration-era England. He emerges as an empathetic, surprisingly modern figure. Below, Lucas Adams illustrates some of his favorite entries from My Own Life. Read More
January 26, 2017 Look Hothouse By Yevgeniya Traps Louise Bourgeois’s holograms at Cheim and Read. Louise Bourgeois, Untitled (detail), 1998–2014, suite of eight holograms, each about 11” x 14”. Holography is a curious technology: at once of the past and of the future, charmingly quaint but also coldly precise, marked by old sci-fi dreaming about the aesthetics of tomorrow. Equal parts kitschy and surreal, it’s sometimes eerily beautiful, seeming to deconstruct itself in its present absence. From the Greek holos (“whole”) and gramma (“message”), the hologram is like a private communiqué, delivered across space and time while respecting the conventions of neither. Unlike a photograph, which records only intensities of light, a hologram produces a three-dimensional view of an object by re-creating, through diffraction, the original light field. (In this way, a hologram is perhaps more like a sound recording than like a photographed image.) Because they require precise lighting conditions and the viewer’s active complicity to achieve their full effect, holograms have a kind of romance to them—the same intimacy borne of circling an object at dusk or twilight and emerging with a memory that isn’t quite yours. Read More