Will Fenstermaker

Rivalry Projects, What Pipeline, Good Weather and april april on exhibiting art between the coasts.

Apr 09

On Four Rust Belt Galleries

EXPO

Feb 25Profile

On David Salle

His new paintings embrace AI as the fractious media environment that he predicted in the 1970s reaches critical mass.

Family Style

Feb 24

On Frieze Los Angeles

Featuring exhibitions by Ramsés Noriega, Wally Hedrick, Cayetano Ferrer, Kunié Sugiura, Tacita Dean, Grigoris Semitecolo and Francisco Rodríguez.

The collector of video art takes over the Variety Arts Theater with an ambitious exhibition that insists on communal viewing as a radical act.

Feb 03

On Julia Stoschek

The LA Times

Jan 28Profile

On Ryan Preciado

The artist sets Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House in motion with a series of meditative sculptures and tapestries.

Family Style

2025

Dec 12

On Beatriz Cortez

A sinking monument prompts reflection on what it means to offer something to a world that will outlast us.

LARB

Nov 03Interview

In Conversation with Lenz Geerk

“It’s not hard to imagine that catastrophe is imminent. What do you do when the world ends? You bake, you dance, you sing, you make art.”

The nonprofit dedicated to artists’ estates provides resources to support a vital yet overlooked component of art history. With Travis Diehl, Marko Gluhaich, Jane Ursula Harris, Terence Trouillot.

Apr 23Profile

On Soft Network

Featuring original photographs by Clara Cullen, Arthur Elgort, Buck Ellison, Camila Falquez, Viviane Sassen and Richie Shazam.

Spring

On Self-Portraiture

Family Style

SpringCatalogue

On Yuri Yuan

Her virtuosic paintings deftly explore the tension between artistry and performance anxiety—the various ways we reveal our creativity even as we conceal ourselves from sight.

Alexander Berggruen

Mar 06Profile

On Yto Barrada

A public artwork in the form of a playgroud, her Le Grand Soir comments on postcolonial architecture and experimental pedagogy.

Featuring exhibitions by Kelly Akashi, Bruce Nauman, Kour Pour, Jon Rafman, Julian Abraham Togar, Charlie Engelman and Issy Wood.

Feb 18

On Frieze Los Angeles

Despite its impressive scope, LACMA’s four-century survey gives cursory treatment to the most pressing concerns—AI, misinformation, surveillance—of digital art today.

Feb 10

On ‘Digital Witness’

Dear Dave

2024

Dec 11

On the Sustainability of Art Criticism

What will culture look like in a society where art is made superfluous by an increasingly urgent demand to monetize the mundane?

The Brooklyn Rail
AICA-USA

Nov 26

On Vicky Colombet

Simultaneously meditative and unmooring, Colombet’s abstract earth scenes jostle and churn with breathtaking tectonic force.

Her paintings inhabit the same routes of self-actualization and Manifest Destiny that structure a Robert Frank or Jack Kerouac road trip—but there’s less optimism here.

Oct 23

On Jane Dickson

In electic sculptures and vessels, the artist melds coarsely painted flashpoints from her life with pop-culture motifs to form dizzying, zoetropic narratives.

Aug 29

On Magdalena Suarez Frimkess

The series is the latest entry, and among the smartest, in a recent succession of satires about the worlds of art and luxury.

Jul 17

On ‘The Curse’

“In my previous works, the figures return the gaze, and they find agency in that. Here, there’s no returning of the gaze. It’s protected.”

May 15Interview

In Conversation with Hayv Kahraman

Made on plastic that the artist salvages from New York City’s beaches, Riley’s scrimshaw tells a folk history of climate collapse.

Jan 10

On Duke Riley

IAAC

2023

Sep 29

On Tetsuya Ishida

Ishida’s blend of surrealist satire and social realism explores the mechanophilia at the heart of modern alienation.

Vernet’s mirror-glazed casts of decorated tenements read as eulogies for a Manhattan that more proudly wore its working-class history.

Aug 08

On Alix Vernet

“A careful analysis of extreme acoustic experiences teaches us how listening can operate more generally as a collective tool for political action.”

May 31Interview

In Conversation with Lawrence Abu Hamdan

“What is the point of revolution that leads right back to finance bros getting all the benefit? … This is the first time when anarchy is not just a promise, it’s actually something achievable.”

Mar 08Profile

On Nadya Tolokonnikova

Artists constantly compete for validation, resources and attention—a condition the Hirshhorn Museum pretends is entertaining on its new reality show.

Mar 08

On ‘The Exhibit’

The LA Times

Mar 03Interview

In Conversation with Adam Charlap Hyman

“There’s a gravity to an object that’s both very precious and a little bit funny.”

An early, nearly complete Hebrew Bible provides critical insight into the development and spread of Abrahamic religions as well as the broader transition from oral to literary traditions in the Levant.

Feb 15

On Codex Sassoon

“Every object has a story. … There’s a sense of character that I’m drawn to. I think of it as personifying them through ink on paper.”

Jan 23Interview

In Conversation with Carly Kuhn

As computer vision and AI increasingly influence everyday life, several artists reveal the hidden images that secretly govern these systems.

Jan 17

On Invisible Images

Social Research

Jan 06

On Auctioneers

A group of new auctioneers is reimagining one of the art world’s most traditional roles for the 21st century.

Schjeldahl was not a peddler of a particular theory. His only agenda was pleasure—the pleasures of art, of looking, of language.

2022

Nov 03Obituary

Remembering Peter Schjeldahl

“I wanted to create visionary images where we cannot tell what is what, what is organic and what is nonorganic, where you have no idea of the scale. Something you haven’t seen before.”

Oct 01Interview

In Conversation with Thomas Ruff

In the Haitian painter’s work, the modernist techniques of collage and pastiche find their parallels in the Kreyòl processes of métissage and appropriation.

Aug 19Catalogue

On Paul Gardère

Independent Art Fair

Jun 09

On Gala Porras-Kim

The artist’s probing installations reframe the seemingly intractable tensions between curating, colonialism and cultural exchange.

The eccentric duo’s inventive, polychromatic cabinets explode stereotypes of Scandinavian design, from the predominance of warm woods to clean, spare lines.

Jun 02

On FreelingWaters

Nearly 700 artworks across six sales realized over $1 billion in one week, while more than 35 artists established personal records at auction.

May 20

On Auction Week

Pecis’s highly collectible and erudite scenes of domesticity are less about the atelier’s mystique than about the fully realized depiction of bourgeois interiority.

Apr 26

On Hilary Pecis

“We don’t tend to think of mathematics as a historical language or even as an aspect of colonialism. We think it exists outside of language, politics and the social.”

Apr 11Profile

On Yasi Alipour

For a fraction of a second following the Big Bang, quarks and gluons existed freely in a primordial, plasmic state. Then, like a photograph, came the moment when everything locked into place.

Apr 05

On Thomas Struth

In this podcast, contemporary artists Elizabeth Colomba, Delphine Diallo and Fabienne Kanor speak about representations of the Black figure in Western art. Written by Melissa Smith.

Mar 09Podcast

On Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux

During the 15 years that Torres-García made these toys, his own work, inspired by friends like Pablo Picasso and Piet Mondrian, became increasingly Cubist and abstract.

Mar 02

On Joaquín Torres-García

In an unincorporated town nestled in the San Jacinto Mountains, a woman named Jessie Homer French paints the end of the world.

Feb 22

On Jessie Homer French

Variable West

Feb 19

On David Weiss

Each sheet comprises a kind of ridiculous exquisite corpse—a scribble becomes a chicken becomes an ouroboros. But while the Surrealists swapped drawings as a way of articulating some collective unconsciousness, Weiss is talking to himself.

Having cut her teeth at such influential galleries as Paula Cooper and Paul Kasmin, Polina Berlin opens her own on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Feb 17

On Polina Berlin

When the innovative artist was commissioned to document the historic expansion of Tōkaidō Road, he created a suite of his most exceptional works.

Feb 01

On Shikō Munakata

By the time Joseph E. Yoakum first picked up a pencil at 71, he’d already traveled the world several times over, first with the circus as a billposter, then as a stowaway and later as an engineer in the First World War.

Jan 10

On Joseph E. Yoakum

The artist’s works in plastic—as well as his large-scale abstractions made with metal, tar and other industrial materials—speak to a global system of labor, the everyday pursuit of beauty and the resiliency of the human spirit.

2021

Dec 01Interview

In Conversation with Hugo McCloud

Often characterized simplistically as an Egyptian Surrealist, Morsi presents a more compelling synthesis of various aesthetic and literary traditions in his work.

Dec 01

On Ahmed Morsi

Oh’s wondrous “copies” re-inject enigma into the mundane, extending the potentiality of historical visions not yet exhausted.

Nov 19

On Chris Oh

The latest experimental thriller from the prize-winning Hungarian author propagates paranoia in an attempt to reproduce a poetic form of pre-Platonic consciousness.

Nov 19

On László Krasznahorkai’s ‘Chasing Homer’

Samson’s paintings, rendered in dark hues with a high-gloss finish, glitter and beckon like black mirrors, offering the sense of an alternative world parallel to ours but not out of sight.

Nov 15

On Cinga Samson

A massive two-museum survey focused on the famed artist’s legacy bypasses new readings of his work.

Nov 12

On Jasper Johns

“What the audience receives is the artist-subjects’ interpretations in the form of the masks, a kind of talking back to that consuming, curious gaze or taking back some of the power.”

Nov 01Interview

In Conversation with Gauri Gill

Adnan’s exhibition at the Guggenheim challenges a persistent misconception about the artist’s career: that her visual practice should be considered independently from her written work.

Oct 26

On Etel Adnan

“The Ramayana will always be instrumentalized by politicians and people who say it’s at the core of what it means to be Indian.”

Oct 18Interview

In Conversation with Vasantha Yogananthan

Berman was one of those once-in-a-generation artists who managed to be both under-known and extraordinarily impactful.

Oct 11

On Wallace Berman

The artist often layers colorful grids over personal documents and historical records—birth certificates, address books and old photos, which he calls the “under-conscious” of his paintings.

Sep 23

On McArthur Binion

SVA’s art criticism & writing degree did not teach critical theory, curatorial practices or any other artistic methodology—other than the craft of writing. It was the only school of its kind in the world, and it only lasted 15 years. With Michael Brenson, Ann Lauterbach, Nancy Princenthal, Lynne Tillman, et al.

Sep 01

On Art Criticism

The daughter of President Bechara El-Khoury, Caland left Beirut for Paris, where she made erotic line drawings of lovers, lips and vulvas.

Aug 12

On Huguette Caland

The idiosyncratic director paints a picture of the world that is so complex, dense and theoretical that the prospect of real change appears nearly impossible.

Summer

On Adam Curtis

Dissent

Jun 08

On Nina Katchadourian

Katchadourian gives new resonance to images that are designed not to be analyzed or are so commonplace we’ve reached mass consensus on their meaning.

“I was thinking about how difficult it is to imagine the future, to imagine freedom. We’re so confined to our own lived experience.”

May 20Interview

On Phoebe Boswell

At once a singular portraitist and an enchanting documentary photographer, Barnor has spent 60 years capturing African life both at home and abroad.

May 06

On James Barnor

David Levi Strauss’s new book looks at the ancient roots of photography to understand how the medium became so distorted in the present.

Apr 09

On ‘Photography and Belief’

T his podcast features Jordan Casteel, Jasmine Wahi and Miguel Luciano speaking about the celebrated painter’s “radical humanism.”

Mar 22Podcast

On Alice Neel

Few manifestos remain in the public consciousness for long and fewer still have defined entire eras. Yet the form persists as a powerful tool for reimagining the future.

Mar 01Panel

On Manifestos

The artist’s stoneware smorgasbord offers a feminist critique of the depraved desire latent within a certain manufactured, tame domesticity.

Feb 16

On Genesis Belanger

“I’m not looking for extremities; I’m looking for a middle ground that feels unusual, but where we can relate to what’s happening in the picture.”

Jan 04Interview

In Conversation with Cassi Namoda

Guzmán’s hallucinatory fever dreams retain the disconcerting but frankly appealing vibe of boho-chic demonology.

2020

Dec 01

On Hulda Guzmán

“ It’s not an accident that my art feels like a welcoming, beautiful thing. … The impact of the Nakba is reflected in Palestinian embroidery too.”

Oct 21Interview

In Conversation with Jordan Nassar

“When does looking become an act of trespass? … I’m interested in empathizing rather than objectifying; I’m trying to enter and connect.”

Oct 08Interview

In Conversation with Celia Hempton

For Hopkins, the créolité mythos allows for the breakdown of colonially imposed dynamics, whether racial, gendered, sexual or classist.

Oct 01

On Andrew LaMar Hopkins

Like a modern-day Joseph Mitchell, Riley is an idiosyncratic student of New York’s seedy underbellies, long preoccupied with maritime history.

Oct 01

On Duke Riley

Strauss’s Dispatches from the End of Communication reframes our political crisis as a crisis of the imagination.

Sep 15

On David Levi Strauss

“When I started making my pixelated paintings, I was thinking about the instability of images: the speed they move at and the speed at which meaning has to be constructed.”

Jul 23Interview

In Conversation with Andrew Sendor

In an increasingly technological world, Huyghe’s work reminds us that we have always asked ourselves what it means to be human.

SummerCatalogue

On Pierre Huyghe

The de Young Museum
The Brooklyn Rail

Jun 08

On Alfred Jarry

A retrospective at The Morgan Library illustrates the sprawling influence of the pataphysician’s grotesque artistic and philosophical creations.

“The kora and ngoni are closer to human beings, because they are made from things that had life. The talking drum, the balafon and the sabar are made from wood, and when you listen to them your mind goes out into the forest.”

May 06Profile

On Baaba Maal

Sime, whose elaborate works are often made of braided electrical wires, motherboards, keyboards, buttons, canvas and carved wood, is wary of superficial “up-cycling” narratives often applied to African artists who repurpose waste.

Mar 25Profile

On Elias Sime

artnet News

Feb 01

On Fiona Tan

Tan’s Archive is a mid-career masterpiece by an artist who has spent decades mining archives and probing their authority.

“Whether a moment is ‘decisive’ or not is not really my concern. … I’m asking why and how we make pictures, and also why and how we look at these pictures.”

Jan 27Interview

In Conversation with Barbara Probst

“I’ve always been drawn to history painting because so many Indigenous experiences were never portrayed.”

2019 & Beyond

Dec 20, 2019Video

In Conversation with Kent Monkman

Wolf’s austere depictions of bleak modernist architecture and urban existence often break down into frank and, at times, jarring moments of intimacy.

Nov 27, 2019

On Michael Wolf

What’s lost may be lost, but Muniz imparts some solace: If we can preserve the image, perhaps that is enough.

Oct 31, 2019

On Vik Muniz

“I’ve appropriated the unreal space of Persian miniature painting, with its traditional figures, gestures and architecture, and used its disproportion and false perspective to intensify the sense of distortion and displacement that I feel navigating the different aspects of my life.”

Oct 30, 2019Interview

In Conversation with Arghavan Khosravi

“Caryatids throughout history have carried these buildings to express the might and the wealth of a particular place. … I wanted to keep the DNA of the woman in an active pose, but I didn’t want her to carry the weight of something or someone else.”

Sep 13, 2019Video

In Conversation with Wangechi Mutu

Notes from a panel responding to the question, “Is there a crisis in the field of art criticism?”

Aug 02, 2019Panel

On a Critical Insurgency

AICA-USA

Jul 13, 2019Video

In Conversation with Oliver Beer

“The museum is like a vast, multichambered instrument just waiting to be played. … Every object brings with it its own history of survival, and those individual stories weave a kind of new narrative together.”

Every day since 1985, Agematsu has walked throughout the boroughs of New York City—and each jaunt has been diligently recorded via notebook entries, drawings and sculptures made from found objects.

May 20, 2019

On Yuji Agematsu

By implicating actual figures in his conspiracies, fabrications and imagistic war games, Raad extends the complicated relationship that official documents have to truth.

Apr 30, 2019

On Walid Raad

“If you think about living in a fascist society where public life becomes impossible, and the state begins to make incursions into private life, then you can see human joy as a very radical act. In that sense, that is one of the roles of art.”

Apr 01, 2019Interview

In Conversation with Mira Schor

Staged in an brownstone on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Adams’s wallpaper interiors propose boldly graphic representations of Black domesticity against the ugly backdrop of contemporary American politics.

Mar 13, 2019

On Derrick Adams

A group of artists and technologists trained a neural network to interpret The Met’s online collection, asking: What does the history of art look like?

Feb 04, 2019

On Artificial Intelligence & Art History

Neumann is a literary painter, preoccupied with clarifying the same “secret image of reality” that possesses both the writer and the state collaborator.

Feb 01, 2019

On Max Neumann

Shen’s canvases, which have drawn comparisons to Abstract Expressionism, were the result of one artist’s struggles—against tradition, against the picture plane, even against himself.

Nov 29, 2018Catalogue

On Shen Fan

Eli Klein Gallery

Nov 01, 2018Interview

In Conversation with Seth Price

“Lack of resolution is something we grant certain kinds of expression, and once you grant that, a kind of richness can unfold.”

Virilio taught that meaning is found not where an event occurs or an image appears, but where it originates. With Mark Dery, Sylvère Lotringer, Paul Miller (DJ Spooky), et al.

Oct 01, 2018Obituary

Remembering Paul Virilio

Fowler’s maximalist assemblages—meticulous, intricate and complexly layered—are steeped with references and allusions to art history, popular culture and the artist’s own familial and personal experiences.

Jul 01, 2018

On Aaron Fowler

Curator Doug Eklund speaks about how Wegman broke the rules of Conceptual art.

May 23, 2018Interview

On William Wegman

The internet, by definition, is only a set of rules that allows computers to talk to each other—a set of protocols, or maybe by now a byzantine bureaucracy.

May 01, 2018

On ‘Art in the Internet Age’

Curator Kelly Baum speaks about Golub’s prescient critiques of power and toxic masculinity.

Apr 10, 2018Interview

On Leon Golub

As philosophical inquiry, her paintings amount, almost inexplicably, to an object-based phenomenology.

Apr 01, 2018

On Nathlie Provosty

Dermisache’s letter-ish scripts comprise a sort of ur-language, which may, on occasion, vaguely resemble the sleekly linear letters of Arabic or the regimented cursive of South Asian abugidas—but they follow no grammar or syntax.

Jan 30, 2018

On Mirtha Dermisache

The Paris Review

Nov 01, 2017Interview

In Conversation with Jimmy Robert

“I’m trying to think of performance as creating a series of images. You could say collage, but I’m thinking also of montage because a succession of images creates a narrative.”

Bolaño crafts different kinds of heroes, youthful and vivacious like Rimbaud, who resist becoming monuments by pursuing the intangible, leaving art, like clouds, in their wake.

Oct 15, 2017

On ‘Distant Star’ Dramatized

Artist-curated exhibitions can be untidy and idiosyncratic in ways that museums and the market abhor, and this can make them interesting, disorienting, dissonant—even iconoclastic in the best instances.

Oct 01, 2017

On Sadie Laska’s ‘Animal Farm’

Much has been penned about the 25 volatile years leading to Gerstl’s death in early November 1908, when the young painter hanged and stabbed himself in the heart.

Sep 01, 2017

On Richard Gerstl

“When you see work that sells at auctions overnight for millions and millions of dollars, well, that doesn’t particularly help the artist very much. He doesn’t get any money from it.”

Jun 16, 2017Interview

In Conversation with Larry Clark

Artspace

Jun 01, 2017

On Content Moderators

“Technofeudalism” refers to an economic condition in which the means of production has shifted from ownership of land to intellectual property.

Lawler’s pictures of power at play peeled back the aggrandizing mythologies that had coopted art; she made images utilitarian once again—in a way they maybe haven’t been since icon painting.

Jun 01, 2017

On Louise Lawler