Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Containing nearly 160 artworks, the exhibition Senufo: Art and Identity in West Africa explores what it means to be “Senufo,” a term describing some of the peoples, languages, and cultures in northern Côte d’Ivoire, southern Mali, and Burkina Faso. It also questions the canonical assumptions applied by many academics and culture brokers to the definition and underlying parameters of Senufo art, culture, and identity. In challenging the long-disputed but tenaciously enduring belief in the “one tribe, one style” model of conceptualizing traditional African art, this exhibition and catalogue embody a more expansive view of Senufo culture that can stand as… Full Review

The exhibition Whistler’s Mother: Grey, Black, and White is as spare and elegant as the painting it celebrates. It presents James McNeill Whistler’s portrait of his mother, Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871), on loan from the Musée d’Orsay, isolated on a deep grey wall. Quotes from the eminently quotable Whistler and his critics punctuate adjacent walls, as does a copy of the artist’s etching Black Lion Wharf (1859), identified as the framed print in the portrait’s background. The simple installation hews to the painting’s logic, for as Whistler wrote in The Gentle Art of Making Enemies (London… Full Review

The subtitle for the twelfth edition of the Sharjah Biennial—“the past, the present, the possible”—is a term that curator Eungie Joo took from an essay by the French philosopher Henri Lefebvre, who wrote about the concept of the right to the city, calling city dwellers to action in collectively shaping their urban environments. Within the context of Joo’s biennial, the title was deployed to address the role of contemporary art—how art is a vehicle to freely express the intangible through tangible form. Enter Steel Rings (2013) by Rayyane Tabet. On the ground floor of the Sharjah Art Museum, I encountered… Full Review

The midcareer retrospective of the German painter Albert Oehlen (b. 1954) at the New Museum arrives with ample fanfare. Many regard Oehlen as one of the most important painters of his generation, and Home and Garden, organized by artistic director Massimiliano Gioni with curator Gary Carrion-Murayari and assistant curator Natalie Bell, is his first solo museum exhibition in New York. The title, suggested by Oehlen, refers to the idea of both interior and exterior spaces, a thematic thread that runs through the artist’s work, while also making a sly reference to decorating magazines. A more appropriate title might have… Full Review

In the fall of 1949, Mathias Goeritz (1915–1990) and his wife Marianne Gast arrived in Mexico. They had spent the last year in Santillana del Mar near the prehistoric cave of Altamira, working with a group of artists that came to be known as La Escuela de Altamira. His stay in Santillana was the culmination of eight prolific years in Spain where his career as an artist began. Employed by the German Consulate in 1941, Goeritz and his wife spent time in Tetouan, Tangier, Malaga, Granada, and Madrid where he befriended many Spanish artists and critics working in the… Full Review

This major survey of Sigmar Polke’s vast body of work completed its three-city tour with a fitting last stop in Cologne, the artist’s long-time studio base. In putting together the first retrospective to cover all phases of his highly prolific career, Kathy Halbreich, with co-curators Mark Godfrey and Lanka Tattersall, faced an enormous task. The scale of the show was a constant theme in the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA) press materials and in the many exhibition reviews published as it traveled. Containing 250 works, it counts among the largest exhibitions ever mounted at MoMA, which in turn justified the… Full Review

Basquiat: The Unknown Notebooks, organized by guest curator Dieter Buchhart and former Associate Curator of Exhibitions Tricia Laughlin Bloom, is an important milestone for the Brooklyn Museum: its opening marks ten years since the museum’s survey of Jean-Michel Basquiat in 2005. The exhibition includes 160 pages from 8 notebooks borrowed from the collection of Larry Warsh and around 30 accompanying paintings and drawings. It is worth noting that the artist has not lacked in shows in recent years. In addition to the Brooklyn Museum exhibition, of recent note was the retrospective, also organized by Buchhart, at the Art Gallery… Full Review

The excellent exhibition El derrumbe de la estatua: hacia una crítica del arte público (1952–2014) (The Falling of the Statue: Toward a Critique of Public Art [1952–2014]) examined developments and shifts in public art practice in Mexico across the last half-century. As the title of the show suggests, the driving premise was to dismantle or topple its traditional definitions. Skillfully curated by José Luis Barrios and Alesha Mercado, the exhibition featured sculptures, models and maquettes, installations, drawings, photography, as well as film and video selected from the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo (University Museum of Contemporary Art) (MUAC) and… Full Review

Cubism constitutes one of the greatest revolutions in the history of Western art, on a par with the one launched at the beginning of the fifteenth century by two other young artists, in another booming economic and cultural center permitting radical innovations within the realms of the arts and sciences—though Florence, at the time that Filippo Brunelleschi and Donatello reached their first heights in the early quattrocento, was an undoubtedly quieter place than was early twentieth-century Paris when Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque reached theirs. Why is such a comparison worthwhile, one might wonder? For one, because both… Full Review

The story told through this exhibition begins and ends in the Garden Court of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) where in 1932 the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera executed a monumental set of wall paintings to celebrate the city’s industrial spirit against the backdrop of the devastating Great Depression. Just months before the arrival of the muralist and his wife, Frida Kahlo, the city had considered closing the museum and selling its artworks, but this commission was part of a larger set of efforts to restore Detroit’s identity. Rivera’s splendid Detroit Industry murals make this show, curated by contemporary specialist… Full Review