Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Eve Hesse Spectres 1960 offers a rare opportunity to look and think carefully about one year in an artist’s career, in this case a very early one. E. Luanne McKinnon’s selection of nineteen paintings (all Untitled) from among the four dozen Eva Hesse made in 1960 offers a satisfying range of small studies and larger compositions, and their hanging within a single gallery at the Hammer allows for provocative overlaps and differences to come forward, leading the viewer confidently into the artist’s thought process. The unobtrusive wall texts that accompany some and not others of these so far rarely… Full Review

Curators Sarah Lewis and Daniel Belasco use a metaphor of alchemy to describe the contemporary works they brought together for The Dissolve, their title for the SITE Santa Fe Eighth International Biennial. The ingredients for the new global media practice they highlight are bodily gestures, advanced digital technologies, and inspirations from early twentieth-century motion picture experiments, resulting in, as the exhibition catalogue states, “new hybrid forms where the homespun meets the high-tech” (20). The six-year process of choosing the final thirty works—twenty-six contemporary and four historical—and conceiving of the spatial and textual accoutrements that would do them justice… Full Review

A grey-green architectural screen with an arcaded view of late medieval Florence—an enlarged detail of the fourteenth-century fresco of the Madonna della Misericordia in the Loggia del Bigallo—drew visitors to the Mount Holyoke Art Museum and into the Harriet L. and Paul M. Weissman Gallery where they encountered the realm of the sacred. Twenty objects dated from ca. 1385 to ca. 1475 comprised The Art of Devotion: Panel Painting in Early Renaissance Italy, including two sculptures and a cassone. These were installed on and against subdued jewel-toned walls of blue and red. The works were arranged… Full Review

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn rewarded patient, introspective viewers with a revelatory experience. Organized by curators Donna De Salvo and Carter E. Foster (of the Whitney Museum of American Art) and Mark Godfrey (of the Tate Modern), this mid-career retrospective compiled three decades of the artist’s quietly enigmatic and provocative photographs, sculptures, drawings, and books. The greatest strength of the exhibition’s recent incarnation at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (ICA), was the rich dialogue developed between the artwork and its site, the ICA’s magnificent waterfront location. The most challenging aspect of the ICA installation was the relative lack of… Full Review

When visiting most major art collections in Canada—be it the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts or the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa—one is likely to encounter the distinctive abstractions created by artists affiliated with “Automatisme,” a Montreal-based modernist movement active during the early 1940s through the 1950s. The Automatistes consisted of a group of young painters who gathered around Paul-Émile Borduas, united by their sympathies for European abstraction and outrage over Montreal’s pervasive cultural and political conservatism. The core of this group included Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron, Roger Fauteux, Fernand Leduc, Jean-Paul Mousseau, Pierre Gauvreau, Louise Renaud, and Jean-Paul… Full Review

The second half of the sixteenth century in Iran and Turkey brought with it great interest in the art of bibliomancy and the utilization of pictures for prognostication. This is made abundantly clear by the recent splendid exhibition at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery in Washington, DC, which centered around four illustrated manuscripts (three written in Persian, one in Ottoman Turkish) dedicated to the art of divination. These four magnificent books contain a large number of paintings that were the focal point of the exhibition and catalogue. Throughout the show they were referred to as: the Dispersed Falnama, which… Full Review

Given the increasingly knotty exigencies of scheduling—much less securing and financing loans—it seems all but inevitable that more and more museums will be forced to feature shows culled from the oft-unseen resources of their permanent collections. Such proverbial icebox raiding was evident at the Hirshhorn of late—and to great consequence. Curated by Valerie Fletcher to fill an eleventh-hour programming gap, Josef Albers: Innovation and Inspiration featured nearly seventy works produced over almost as many years (from a 1917 sketch of workers’ houses to 1973’s comparatively monumental Variants), a number of which had never been exhibited previously. Augmented by select… Full Review

At first glance, the scale of Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage, initially on view at the Art Institute of Chicago, belies its significance. The exhibition features photocollages, composed of cut-out albumen prints pasted into watercolored settings and assembled into albums by women (mostly) and men of the Victorian era. The Art Institute of Chicago exhibition contained works illustrating fifteen albums, some of which had been disassembled and not previously displayed together until this monumental undertaking. Individual pages from these disassembled albums lined the walls, while intact albums were displayed in cases. Wall decorations, composed of enlarged… Full Review

The exhibition (and accompanying catalogue) Hans Hofmann: Circa 1950 sets out to convince viewers that it was a “singularly important year” in the artist’s career (9). In contrast, at a panel discussion on March 27, 2010, at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, curator Catherine Morris referred to 1950 as a “minor moment” in Hans Hofmann’s life. So which is it? After several visits and a thorough reading of the catalogue, it’s hard to say. While the year was clearly a momentous one for Hofmann (American, b. Germany, 1880–1966), it was only sometimes so for the reasons the curators suggest… Full Review

During the Tibetan Shrine exhibition at the Sackler gallery in Washington, DC, at the foot of the staircase leading into the museum’s subterranean atrium, a red gateway drew visitors toward a small opening on the opposite, neutral wall. Introductory wall text explained that what lay inside approximated a shrine that an elite family in Tibet might have had in their home. Comprised of objects collected over several decades by Alice Kandell, the single-room shrine installation was an adaptation of what one might encounter in her New York home. Upon visiting Sikkim as a young woman, Kandell became fascinated by Tibetan… Full Review