February 17, 2016 Look Unexpected Eisenstein By Rob Sharp Sergei Eisenstein, Set design for act 3 of Heartbreak House (unrealized), 1922, paper, pencil, ink and watercolor on paper. ©Russian State Archive of Literature and Art, Moscow In November 1929, the thirty-one-year-old Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was the world’s most notorious film director. Four years earlier, Battleship Potemkin, his euphorically reviewed, highly influential tour de force about mutiny on the eponymous naval vessel, had brought him both acclaim and infamy. Infected with wanderlust, Eisenstein won permission from Stalin to leave Russia on a short research trip. He took off in August 1929, with twenty-five dollars in his pocket. He returned home, reluctantly, just under three years later. During the ensuing whirlwind—to Berlin, Paris, London, then on to Hollywood—Eisenstein met with the world’s leading intellectuals, actors, and avant-garde artists: James Joyce, Jean Cocteau and Robert Desnos in France, George Bancroft in Germany, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich and Gary Cooper in the United States. His grand tour often gets overshadowed by his disastrous film collaboration in Mexico with the novelist Upton Sinclair—framed in Peter Greenaway’s 2015 movie Eisenstein in Guanajuato—but British culture was a significant and often neglected long-term source of interest. Read More
February 9, 2016 Look Hands, Spatula By Dan Piepenbring The Japanese artist Izumi Kato has his first solo exhibition in the U.S. at Galerie Perrotin, in New York, through February 27. Eschewing brushwork, Kato, forty-six, paints directly with his hands, rubbing the colors deep into the canvas; he wears latex gloves to protect his skin from the toxic oil paints and sometimes makes use of a spatula. His work, at once atavistic and endearing, features vaguely humanoid figures with penetrating gazes. More recently, he’s turned to sculpture, using camphor wood and a soft vinyl called sofub to bring his creatures into the third dimension. See more of his work at Artnet News. Izumi Kato, Untitled, oil on canvas. All photos by Guillaume Ziccarelli. Courtesy the artist and Galerie Perrotin. Read More
February 3, 2016 Look Things People Do By Dan Piepenbring Mernet Larsen’s exhibition “Things People Do” is at James Cohan Gallery through February 21. Larsen, seventy-five, works in what she has called “old-fashioned narrative paintings … statements of longing.” “What I use are these perspectival ploys—diverse perspective, parallel perspective,” she told The Huffington Post last year. “You’re always sort of moving around inside the painting; you can never quite figure out where you’re standing, so you kind of absorb it. Matisse does that too for me too. And a lot of Japanese art, from the twelfth century particularly. They bring you inside and outside the space, you have no particular position. You can’t quite get your bearings. And yet, I want you to have a sense of orient, a sense of mass, a sense of depth.” Mernet Larsen, Alphie, 2015, acrylic and mixed media on canvas, 71 1/8″ x 39 1/2″. Read More
February 2, 2016 Look One Percent By Geoff Dyer Photographing inequality. A chef from a nearby luxury lodge waits for his guests to arrive from a hot-air-balloon excursion before serving them champagne in the middle of the Maasai Mara National Reserve, Kenya. Guillaume Bonn, 2012—INSTITUTE Have you ever stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel in Mumbai? I’d warmly recommend it. It’s super luxurious and, right next door, there’s a classic slum. So you can do a quick slum tour and get back to your sanctuary without any inconvenience but with some excellent snaps. The great Indian photographer Raghubir Singh termed this genre of photography “the abject as subject.” It has a long and distinguished history—and not just in what used to be called the Orient. In the 1930s, photographers such as Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange produced images of sharecroppers and Okies, which drew attention both to the conditions in which these unfortunates found themselves and to their heroic fortitude. This resilience was easily incorporated into the ideology of ceaseless endeavour that continues to underpin the system of exploitation that condemned them to destitution in the first place. It’s just that now, instead of loading up your jalopy and heading for California, you take a second, badly paid job; The Grapes of Wrath has turned into Nickel and Dimed. The iconic photographs of the Great Depression, meanwhile, have acquired a kind of stonewashed glamour. Read More
January 25, 2016 Look Lost Downtown By Dan Piepenbring Peter Hujar, Candy Darling on her Deathbed, 1973, digital pigment print, 20″ x 16″. “Peter Hujar: Lost Downtown” opens this Thursday at Paul Kasmin Gallery. The exhibition chronicles Hujar’s time on the Lower East Side between 1972 and 1985, when he photographed his friends and acquaintances, including Susan Sontag, John Waters, Andy Warhol, David Wojnarowicz, Paul Thek, Edwin Denby, Divine, Fran Lebowitz, and William Burroughs. “There was something about him that invited a personal intimacy,” the writer Vince Aletti said of Hujar, who died in 1987. “He was very allowing. He allowed people to be themselves.” Hujar’s photos are on view through February 27. Read More
January 20, 2016 Look Janet Fish: Glass & Plastic By Dan Piepenbring Janet Fish, Untitled, 1984, lithograph poster, 26” x 33”, edition of 250, signed and numbered Janet Fish’s “Glass & Plastic: The Early Years, 1968–78” is at DC Moore Gallery through February 13, featuring an impressive array of her trademark still lifes and her work with light. “The reason for painting glass was to totally focus on light, and the glass held the light,” Fish said in 1968. She said of her approach to still life, “It’s really as much painting life as anything else … because it’s not dead. Things aren’t dead. The light is through everything and energy through everything.” In 1964, The Paris Review launched a series of prints by major contemporary artists. Underwritten by Drue Heinz, the series was designed to encourage works in the print medium and to publicize the magazine. Largely through the efforts of Jane Wilson, who was chosen by George Plimpton to direct the program, dozens of artists donated signed and limited editions of original work. The print above, by Janet Fish, was completed in 1984; it’s still available from our online store. Below, four works from the DC Moore exhibition. Read More