Donald Kuspit reviews "Peter Sacks: Above Our Lands" for the December issue of Artforum.

He writes, "There were hints of color, too, in 'Without Title,' but nowhere was hue more lavish and consummate—a delirious end in itself—than in the fourth and final body of work on view. The ten works in the 'Above Our Lands' series, 2021–22, are an Abstract Expressionist tour de force. With their delirious Gordian knots of color more or less centered on white paper, these transcendental abstractions enliven in their dramatic interweaving of oddly organic shapes. Stunning in their gestural intricacy and emotional richness, they show Sacks rising above lands of human suffering."

Sophie Lee picks "Guillermo Kuitca: Graphite Paintings from The Tablada Suite (1992) and Poema Pedagógico (1996)" as a highlight for CULTURED's This Week in Culture column. 

Jacoba Urist includes Amy Lincoln among six artists to see at this year's Art Basel Miami Beach.

She writes, "There’s no substitute for actually standing before Amy Lincoln’s sublime colorform. Her imagined abstractions evoke a wondrous world of wavy, celestial horizons and groovy foliage. 'I’ve been exploring the idea of depicting water, sky, and celestial bodies in any possible color or combination of colors to see how weird the color could get while still referencing the peace and connection that I feel in nature,' she explains about her seascape paintings.

Indeed, Lincoln’s dreamy masterpieces blur the trippy and the serene. Her painting Radiant Sun With Trees, 2022, on view at the fair conjures newer tree imagery, alongside her signature sun motif, with its incandescent, zigzag gradations. 'I want to experiment with color, but also determine how much the color needs to function to still feel like a tree,' says Lincoln—a must-see this week, ahead of her hotly-awaited spring exhibition, which will unfold over two floors at Sperone Westwater New York in early March."

Eileen Kinsella picks Joana Choumali's I HAVE LOVED THE STARS TOO FONDLY TO BE FEARFUL OF THE NIGHT, 2022, as one of the seven must-see artworks at the ADAA Art Show.

She writes, "The gallery presented a solo show of seven new photographic works by Ivorian artist Joana Choumali from her latest series, 'Alba’hian,' titled after an Agni word which highlights the powerful energy that comes with the first light of morning. Choumali embarks on daily walks between 5 and 7am, often photographing the Abidjan landscape at dawn. 

These works are created with a mix of materials and techniques, including collage, embroidery, quilting and photomontage. Choumali builds up these early morning images by superimposing layers of sheer toile and gold paint atop them and adding other photographs, such as silhouettes of figures or quiet scenes on empty roads. She calls the dawn “a magical time, where there is a sense of dialogue between reality and dream.”

Maximilíano Durón selects Sperone Westwater's solo presentation of Joana Choumali's work as one of the best booths at the 2022 ADAA Art Show.

He writes, "After staging Joana Choumali’s first U.S. solo show earlier this spring, Sperone Westwater has brought to this fair seven new entries in her ongoing 'Alba’hain' series, which takes its name from an Agni word that 'denotes the powerful energy that comes with the first light of morning,' according to a release. With this in mind, Choumali, who is based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, departs on her daily walks at 5 a.m. and continues on until 7 a.m. Along the way, she photographs the changing light of the sky and the people she passes. She then transfers these various photographs (at different scales) to canvas to create quiet, meditative compositions that seem to glimmer just as the sky would at dawn."

Photo: Maximilíano Durón/ARTnews

The Busch-Reisinger Museum was recently gifted more than 70 sketchbooks kept by artist Otto Piene (1928–2014). Dating from 1935 to 2014, the largely unpublished sketchbooks reflect interdisciplinary, cross-media experiments from Piene’s long career in the Boston area and abroad, including both realized and unrealized projects. A pioneer in multimedia and technology-based art, Piene was long interested in optical perception and kinetic forces, resulting in a body of work that emphasizes collaboration and the intersections of art, science, and nature. The diverse themes and approaches in Piene’s sketchbooks open pathways into his individual artistic practice as well as into the multivalent nature of the sketchbook: an art object, a portable studio, a record of visual thinking, and a space for material experimentation. “[M]any ideas have sprung up in full flight during the physical act of making things,” Piene once remarked. “To a large extent, art comes out of the practice of art.”

While researching, cataloging, and digitizing the sketchbooks—over 9,000 pages—Jeff Steward, the museums’ director of digital infrastructure and emerging technology, and Lauren Hanson, the Stefan Engelhorn Curatorial Fellow in the Busch-Reisinger Museum, teamed up to show how curatorial practice coupled with computer science and data visualization can expose hidden stories, spawn new conversations, and transform our understanding of Piene’s artistic practice. This installation brings to light their experimentation with human and AI-generated data. Through large-scale monitors on the gallery wall, visitors can browse Piene’s digitized sketchbooks by using either an iPad stationed in the gallery or their own smartphone. The sketchbooks are presented as a large matrix of thumbnail images arranged in chronological order; each page is viewable in high resolution. The pages can also be explored by dominant color or by AI-generated descriptive tags.

In the spirit of Piene’s dedication to collaborative practice and learning through creating, we invite visitors to interact with this installation and explore the vibrant imagery and information within the sketchbooks, while also experimenting with emerging technologies and digital tools as a means for creating new information, new knowledge, and new ways of seeing.

Jessica Shearer picks "Peter Sacks: Resistance" as an exhibition to see in Boston and beyond this fall for Boston Art Review.

She writes, "'Peter Sacks: Resistance' offers a remedy to anyone (i.e., all of us) who has exhausted their own stores of outrage. With layers of paint, fabric, photography, text, and ephemera, Sacks pays brilliant homage to the artists, writers, and leaders who have inspired his own dedication to activism, which began during the apartheid era in his native South Africa. His love of language—he is a celebrated poet and scholar—is apparent throughout, not only by the high concentration of writers in the more than ninety portraits, but also in the accompanying soundscape, where contributors as illustrious and varied as John Kerry and Claire Messud read a quote or a passage from the activist of their choosing. A visit is both humbling and galvanizing, a moment to look back at those who would urge us forward."

Jonathan Goodman reviews "Peter Sacks: Above Our Lands" for The Brooklyn Rail.

He writes: "Sacks’s large paintings convey a tacit regard for the unknowable; the figure paintings can be read as studies in symbolic meaning. His combination of the abstract frames, along with the realistic details of the subject’s photographed image, enables Sacks to comment politically in the Resistance series by implying darkness non-objectively. Thus, the Resistance series, a tough-minded eulogy for those who fought intolerance, shows how committed struggle demands awareness and action. Remarkably, his social commitment is aligned with a skilled use of abstraction, in a way that politicizes the abstraction by its closeness to recognizable political imagery. Sacks has emphasized his intuition to focus on both abstraction and social commentary with marked success."

Read the full review at the below link.

Duo Beverly Price and Shaunté Gates join The Nicholson Project as our first artists-in-residence for 2023, working on a series of new collaborative mixed-media paintings and video works that reflects and stretch the imagination about the communities in DC that they were raised and still reside, and that are dear to their hearts. Introduced to photography in 2016, Beverly Price witnessed the rapid effects of gentrification around her and felt moved to document its progression so that her fellow DC natives could read a story told by one of their own. But it wasn't until she dreamt of four black boys with royal blue eyes that her documentation grew from pure interest to powerful storytelling. The dream's subjects rose from the grounds of a historic black community in Washington, DC. Price recollects the boys spoke in a sound language, gifting her a camera, and then returning underground. She realized her dream of the "blue-eyed black boys'' was a divine assignment to pick up her camera and visually explore adolescence and the black boy experience in Washington, DC. She uses the camera to highlight the youth's beauty, innocence, dignity, plight against stereotypes, and longing for solutions. Growing up in and around public housing projects during the “war on drugs,” Shaunté Gates witnessed how mythologies produced social constructs, imagination, and how the limits therein inform our reality. Gates produces dreamscape-like compositions rife with cinematic moments of beauty, chaos, and glory depicting the labyrinth of social constructs we are all wading through. He works across mixed media collage and video to subvert landscapes with architecture embedded with cultural symbologies and caste categorizations. Gates’ use of found materials–fabrics, canvas, paper, coins, and photographs–evoke the energy and cultural relevance of the items’ site of origin and the popular culture referenced within these works. Gates refers to these landscapes as “Land of Myth,” and as such denotes, mythologies are layered within the materials. He describes his work as psychogeography, focusing on our psychological experiences of the city and illuminates forgotten, discarded, or marginalized aspects of the urban environment. Friends and family are often the photographed figures transfigured into a half-animal form or other motifs of mythology. They appear concurrently ancient and futuristic, exploring themes of duality, religion, introspection, and escapism. Gates has been commissioned to create many public art works throughout Washington, DC, including Transcending, a painting commemorating the 140th anniversary of Howard University School of Law. His work is included in the Smithsonian Institution’s Men of Change (2019-2022) traveling exhibition, spanning ten museums including California African American Museum, Cincinnati Underground Railroad Museum, and Washington State History Museum. His work in many esteemed private collections, and his work has been acquired by the Studio Museum in Harlem.

Image (L to R): Beverly Price (credit: Leed Oliveira), Shaunté Gates.

Domus selects "Bruce Nauman: Neons Corridors Rooms" as a must-see exhibition this fall.

Clara Rodorigo writes, "Until 26 February 2023 Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan presents “Bruce Nauman. Neons Corridors Rooms”, a project by Pirelli HangarBicocca, Milan, Tate Modern, London and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, dedicated to one of the most celebrated living artists, who has marked the history of contemporary art from the mid-1960s to the present. An artistic practice that explores themes of human experience, the psyche, the perception of the body in relation to space, time and language, and is articulated in multiple mediums, including installation, video, sculpture, performance, photography, drawing and sound. The focus of the exhibition is on Nauman’s spatial and architectural research, and the exhibition itinerary is divided into corridors and rooms, outlining a sometimes confusing labyrinth that knows how to turn a difficult set-up into further food for thought."

Nico Kos Earle reviews "Bruce Nauman: Neons Corridors Rooms" at Pirelli HangarBicocca for Artlyst.

She writes, "Paradoxical by nature, his works hold space for constant revision, and have become the site for an ongoing curatorial conversation between some of the greatest thinkers in the art world. His corridors and rooms invite us to relinquish the safety of the familiar and offer us the chance to step into that strange, uncomfortable place of creative production. They show us how unreliable our sense of time is, or how slippery language can be when trying to pin down a concept. They also capture the impenetrable silence of a creative imperative; the way our mind replays a phrase that no-one else can hear, which is nonetheless a call to action. He has influenced generations of artists, he is also still alive."

Mark Hudson reviews "Bruce Nauman: Neons Corridors Rooms" at Pirelli HangarBicocca for Independent.

He writes, "The best works involve Nauman’s own voice. Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968), simply a six foot square room with a single lightbulb and the artist’s voice endlessly repeating the work’s title in ever more gravelly tones, gives an idea of what it might be like to be trapped in a box with a fairy tale ogre.But best in show is False Silence (1975). The work is another constricting corridor along which you pass, with the artist’s murmuring voice growing progressively louder, to find yourself at a darkened dead end with Nauman describing a depersonalised state in which someone (the artist, the viewer or both?) is stripped of bodily and emotional responses – “you can’t hurt me, you can’t help me” – to become “an observer, a consumer, a user only.” The effect is at once chillingly funny and impressive. Only a truly courageous artist would force the viewer to stumble up a blank corridor, only to tell them that they’re a meaningless cipher in a work that both lampoons and embodies the dehumanisation of contemporary life.I wouldn’t want to live in Nauman’s world, but I left my brief visit feeling at once numbed and strangely exhilarated."

The Wall Street Journal asks Peter Sacks about their monthly topic: persistence.

He responds, “I use materials that are themselves persistent—not just paint, but fabrics and fragments and quotations. I’m not only invested in creating something that persists, but I’m making a work of persistence. That’s important to me in terms of my sense of what it means to be human, my sense of history, my sense of what the art itself can do. It’s the opposite of Yeats’s ‘Things fall apart.’ The artist’s job is to somehow hold them together. Often persistence is thought of as just maintaining or conserving, but in art it requires renewal. Even before thinking about my métier, my primary commitment is to persist as a human being. That means maintaining humanity. It means maintaining our planet as we have it now.”

Sacks is a painter and a poet. His exhibitions Resistance and Above Our Lands are up this fall, respectively, at the Rose Art Museum and at Sperone Westwater.

WBUR in Boston picks the Rose Art Museum's "Peter Sacks: Resistance" as one of 13 exhibitions to see this fall. 

Pamela Reynolds writes, "'Resistance' is a word we’ve heard over and over again in the last few years of political division and turmoil. Now, we have an opportunity to see resistance standard bearers in this first museum solo show featuring the work of South African-born artist Peter Sacks. Sacks presents more than 90 portraits, never before exhibited, of people who have fought political, racial and cultural oppression. The portraits, crafted of fabric, paint, personal items and text, range from historical figures like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman to present-day resistance fighters like Volodymyr Zelenskyy. As part of the show, visitors can hear an 'audio collage' of the voices of various contemporary literary, political, social and cultural figures who recite excerpts chosen from resistors’ writing. Full disclosure: WBUR is a media partner for this show, but we would have written about it no matter what."

Brandon Zech reviews William Wegman's exhibition of paintings at Texas Gallery for Glasstire.

He writes, "If you’re a Wegman fan, or a fan of good painting, this is a show to see. The artist has been hammering away at the medium far too much for these works to fly under the radar any longer. It’s my hope that, as Wegman’s paintings gain more exposure and recognition (his two other shows on view this summer, at Sperone Westwater in New York and Marc Selwyn Fine Art in Beverly Hills, also featured a trove of paintings), that the powers that be will see they’re worthy. While the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, and other institutions are collectors of the artist’s videos, photos, and drawings, his paintings have gone more or less unaccessioned. It’s only a matter of time before some keen curator or museum director realizes that a Wegman collection (and a collection of contemporary American painting) is not complete without one of the artist’s scenes."

Read the full review at the below link.

Andrew Lampert, curator of "William Wegman: Writing by Artist," interviews William Wegman for BOMB Magazine.

AL: When you started exhibiting drawings in 1973, what was the landscape like for artists drawing? It seems like that was the middle of a minimalism/post-minimalism period and that your particular style of drawing would have been aesthetically verboten. 

WW: I’m not really sure. Back then, I was showing videos and photos at Sonnabend Gallery and elsewhere. It seemed to me that one more thing was needed, and when I started to do the drawings, my work felt complete. Photo, video, drawing—simple, perfect, portable. I considered myself a minimalist conceptualist for better or for worse, and these drawings were minimal so they fit that category nicely. 

AL: Would you say that you are still a minimalist today?

WW: Absolutely not. I completely shattered all of that. That’s gone. Sadly, the messy and bulky prevails. I think an artist needs a manifesto that states what you won’t do more than what you will do. It’s good to have rules and so forth, which I did, and later I got bored and broke them.

AL: Your conceptual approach took root when you were in school and you really flourished during your early California years. Before moving to New York in 1973, you were already showing alongside other conceptualists and minimalists. Did you think of the photos and videos you were making as satirizing this scene?

WW: Not really, not satire. I’m not sure how to describe it.

AL: There’s a big difference between satire and parody. And there’s also just tongue-in-cheek humor. 

WW: The reason that humor appealed to me is that early on I would show my work, and someone would say, “It’s interesting.” Then a little later, when I would show my photos, videos, and drawings and someone would burst out laughing, I knew they really got it. I was looking for clarity in my work. I had to “get” it myself.  

AL: Interesting is such a stand-in word. You know, the idea that humor is a lower form of expression is ridiculous. There is such a wide realm of art that is so flat, it doesn’t elicit any type of reaction. When work is funny, or even sad, people tend to have a prejudiced reaction, as if it is somehow easy. But making work that people viscerally respond to is actually hard. 

WW: Not for me. When I first started working, I was really striving for clarity. What I liked about my videos was that my mother would like them, my neighbor would like them, anybody would like them. Whereas with other works of mine, you’d perhaps have to know something, be schooled in something. The videos just seemed to break through. That’s something very strong. 

Read more at the below link.

Andrew Russeth reviews Tom Sachs's concurrent exhibitions in Seoul, South Korea, including “Space Program: Indoctrination” at Art Sonje Center and “Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective 1999-2022” at HYBE INSIGHT.

He writes, "Lurking beneath the charisma of Sachs’s inventions is a nostalgic wistfulness. Emblazoned with American flags and NASA logos, they nod to a time when the country could pursue grand goals, when it could dream. Their sturdy, do-it-yourself construction is also a tacit riposte to the built-in obsolescence of so many products today. “His criticality is not really direct,” said Sunjung Kim, Art Sonje’s artistic director, who organized the show. “It’s a detour, and also there’s humor in it.” (Asked about the source of his D.I.Y. sensibilities, Sachs mentioned a grandfather who grew up during the Depression whose own father was “a rag-and-bone man” on the hardscrabble Lower East Side. “He would get home with four flat tires,” Sachs said; his grandfather helped patch them.)"

Read the full article at the below link.

Tali Jaffe Minor speaks with Helmut Lang about recent work, an upcoming exhibition and living and working in East Hampton.

"TJM: How has the local landscape affected your work?

HL: I would assume it influences my work in an unconscious way as every surrounding does. Water gives me a sense of endless time—equally, the undisturbed natural landscape wherever this still exists. I find this feeling reassuring and continuous. On the other hand, it creates a counterreaction to be radical in art in opposition to nature."

Read the full interview at the link below.

Last week, Brainard Carey interviewed William Wegman for The Lives of the Artists, Architects, Curators and More podcast on Yale Radio. They discussed work in his current show at Sperone Westwater and the book that inspired it, William Wegman: Writing by Artist. 

Listen to the podcast at the link below.

Emily Watlington reviews "William Wegman: Writing by Artist." 

She writes, "At first glance, William Wegman’s survey at Sperone Westwater in New York might read as an attempt to remind viewers that, despite his reputation as reigning dog portraitist, Wegman is in fact a serious artist. The exhibition coincides with the release of 'William Wegman: Writing by Artist,' published by Primary Information and edited by artist-curator Andrew Lampert (a contributor to this magazine), who also curated the show. Of the more than 70 works on view, most are black-and-white, and only a handful of videos feature his signature canines. The works look, on the surface, nothing like Wegman’s iconic oversize Polaroids of Weimaraners, often shown sporting silly human outfits. The dogs—being, well, dogs—are never in on the joke. Their indifferent expressions and drooping jowls convey an endearing oblivion, undercutting the ostentatiousness of the tableaux. (The Weimaraners are immortalized in a mosaic in New York’s 23rd Street subway station on 6th Avenue—hands down, the best subway art in the city.) Instead of those familiar images, the show includes many drawings on paper, as well as a couple of paintings on canvas or wood panels and vintage videos on cube monitors. These formats look more obviously white cube than do the Polaroids, or the Sesame Street segments that featured Wegman’s pets, and brought him greater fame when they first aired in 1989. But this other work is just as goofy, thank goodness. The burn is just slower, mostly because, often, reading is required."

Ann C. Collins reviews "William Wegman: Writing by Artist."

She writes, "Hanging in the entryway of Sperone Westwater Gallery is a framed sheet of paper on which, written in pencil, are the words, 'wall, wall, wall, wall …' and down at the bottom, 'floor, floor, floor, floor…' In the center of the page, set apart from the repetition of wall and floor, is the word picture. Deceptively simple, the written words synergize into an abstraction that not only depicts what the viewer sees—a picture hanging on a wall in a room—but brings the viewer into an awareness of their relationship to the work: wall, floor, picture. You are standing here in front of this. Immaculate, simple, and quite clever, Wall, Picture, Floor (1973) serves as a perfect point of entry for William Wegman: Writing by Artist, an exhibition of texts, drawings, photographs, and videos plucked from an ongoing practice spanning fifty years. Like all things Wegman, the work makes me laugh, but it also stays with me, begging me to continue twisting it around in my head days after the initial chuckle."

Read the full review at the link below.

Johanna Fateman reviews "William Wegman: Writing by Artist" for The New Yorker's Goings on About Town.

She writes, "For fifty years, Wegman's pithy Conceptualism has been rooted in humor–dad jokes, you might say–as the texts, drawings, photos, paintings, and videos in this career-spanning exhibition, astutely curated by Andrew Lampert, make clear. The show's title, "Writing by Artist," reflects Wegman's enduring, perhaps even defining, interest in language. One altered advertisement on view pair an illustration of a modular home with the absurdist caption "Woman Carrying Package," directing attention to an almost indiscernible figure in the distance. An unfinished letter to the Parks Department, typed on Princess Cruises letterhead, establishes a Mad Libs-worthy scenario, as it inquires about a summertime ironing class. But it's a looping program of Wegman's early Portapak videos that is the real standout. The best of them (which is to say, most of them) are brilliantly brief: take "Deoderant," from 1972, in which the artist sprays his armpit for nearly a minute, while intoning a deadpan product endoresement."

Sperone Westwater is delighted to announce the acquisition of Peter Sacks’s “Without Name,” 2020, by The Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. The newly acquired work will be shown in the museum’s 60th anniversary collection show, “re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum.”

Commenting on the recent acquisitions, Gannit Ankori, Henry and Lois Foster Director and Chief Curator, stated: “We are thrilled to welcome the exceptional work of Jeffrey Gibson, Barkley L. Hendricks, Peter Sacks, and Marie Watts into the Rose collection. We are always looking for work that helps fill in the lacunae, making our collection more reflective of and responsive to our complex world. These pieces offer new perspectives, ideas, experiences, and voices, deepening our already stellar permanent collection.”

Artnet News picks "William Wegman: Writing by Artist" as a not to miss exhibition during New York Art Week.

Assistant Curator Lydia Caston interviews Joana Choumali for the Victoria & Albert Museum Blog.

"We are so delighted to have your work come into our collection. It is such a moving series of photographs and is quite literally stitched with emotion. How did this project come about?

Thank you. I am grateful to have my work coming into your collection. I started the project less than a month after the March 2016 Grand-Bassam terrorist attack, when three gunman opened fire in the streets and at beach resorts. The images in the series are all taken on my smartphone. I went to Grand-Bassam to attend a conference organised by the Ivorian society of psychiatrists. The conference’s theme was ‘how to cope with the trauma of a terrorist attack’; to explain to the population of Grand-Bassam how they could understand and work on their trauma and to encourage them to come to the free consultations at the General Hospital of Grand-Bassam. This was because, except for the first week after the attacks, people would hardly talk about their experience and their trauma."

Read the full interview at the link below.

Christina Cacouris reviews Joana Choumali's current exhibition.

She writes, "Though so much of her work is rooted in Ivorian culture, there’s a universality to these images, a clear emotional through line that can be felt without knowing any backstory or context. 'I’m really convinced that there is a dimension that is beyond color or culture or shape or size or skin tone, and it’s the core of what makes us human,' she says. 'And this is what also allows someone from New York to see my work without knowing me, without talking to me, and getting things—and giving me feedback that I thought that I was the only one to feel or think. It’s the most beautiful reward of being an artist to be able to share something with someone I don’t know and maybe touch him or her through my work.'"

Horses, dancers, cyclists, animal carcasses, mannequins—these subjects sustained Susan Rothenberg for nearly half a century. A celebration of Rothenberg’s life and her legacy at MoMA, this presentation traces the full arc of the artist’s career by presenting 10 of her paintings, drawn from the more than 40 works in all mediums in the Museum’s collection.

Starting out in the early 1970s, Susan Rothenberg resolved “to paint an image of something you could recognize and feel something about”—a bold move at a moment when abstraction dominated New York City’s art scene. She settled on the horse, a subject she believed she could use to “negate painting as much as possible, in terms of illusionism and shadow and composition.” In what would become her signature palette of dirty whites, warm blacks, and muted reds, Rothenberg bisected, isolated, and flattened her equine subjects, positioning their silhouetted forms like totems or glyphs against starkly painted voids.

By the 1980s, she moved to the human body—at times in motion, at times in pieces. “After years of trying to make things static, I was involved in making them move,” she reflected. Inspired by her involvement with avant-garde dance in New York, she made a series of six monumental paintings of dancers—whose floating forms are animated by lively, seemingly pulsating brushstrokes—for the PaineWebber Group’s dining room in Manhattan. In 1990, Rothenberg shifted course once again when she moved to New Mexico, where she often painted scenes from multiple vantage points, depicting objects and experiences inspired by her daily life.

Organized by Cara Manes, Associate Curator, with Lydia Mullin, Curatorial Assistant, Department of Painting and Sculpture, MoMA.

Image: Susan Rothenberg. Triphammer Bridge, 1974. Acrylic and tempera on canvas. 67 1/8″ x 9′ 7 3/8″ (170.5 x 292.1 cm). The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of Edward R. Broida.

For more information, please visit MoMA.org at the link below.

Joana Choumali speaks about her work The Return of the Swallows, 2021, with Alwa Cooper for T Magazine.

“I started this project at a very difficult time in my life, and working on it each morning was both a spiritual journey and a physical exercise that helped me through,” says the artist, who lost her mother to Covid-19 last August. “We were very close, and it’s still difficult for me to talk about. So all the works that I’m showing in the exhibition, including this one, create a kind of journal of my grief and became a way for me to say goodbye to her. Most of the figures in these works are wearing white, which in our culture is the color of mourning. It’s the color we wore to my mother’s funeral. The silhouetted children in this picture were photographed on Senegal’s Goree Island. I was drawn to their innocence and joy, the carelessness that children can have.”

Read the full article below.

Arthur Lubow reviews Joana Choumali's new show for The New York Times.

He writes, "In a subsequent collection produced this year, “Alba’hian,” which in the Anyin language denotes the energy of dawn, Choumali works on a larger scale, portraying groups of people, sometimes in multipanel compositions. These photographs have been collaged to create theatrically flamboyant skies and larger-than-life figures. The tropical scenes are lusher, with luxuriant vegetation, and the embroidery denser. They are covered with a delicate voile, as if shrouded by a humid mist.

In one, “I Am Enough” (2022), a sorceress juggles planets as she stands alongside a beach pier, conjuring the cosmic in the quotidian. It could be Choumali’s self-portrait."

Read the full article below.

Curator Carlos Basualdo, artist and writer Joan Simon, and curator Robert Storr join Rail contributor Constance Lewallen for a conversation about Bruce Nauman's exhibitions at Punta della Dogana, Venice and Sperone Westwater.

Rachel Summer Small reviews "Bruce Nauman: His Mark." 

She writes, "The first video pair, stacked vertically, reaches up into the gallery’s atrium; upon donning 3-D glasses, this orientation becomes immediately dizzying, as if you're dangling upside-down in front of a cliff-face—and, unexpectedly, it’s exhilarating in that way, too. In the next space, the channels appear side by side, separated by the right angle of the room’s corner. Upstairs, the third variation, rendered in black and white, situates the channels on opposite walls.

Across all three versions, the closer you stand to the projections (and you should go closer), the more jarring of an experience it becomes to see these gigantic hands—none other than Bruce Nauman’s, flecked with spots of discoloration, hairs, patches of dry skin and so on—sweeping by, seemingly just inches from your face. Yet it’s also at this juncture of illusory physical contact that the iconic artist’s identity becomes obfuscated; his hands grow larger, more distorted and then suddenly immaterial, dissolving into light and air. Therein mortality looms. All that impermanence leaves much unspoken for, opening a future of possibilities."

Helen Stoilas and Gabriella Angeleti pick "Bruce Nauman: His Mark" as one of three exhibitions to see this weekend.

They write, "The exalted American artist Bruce Nauman has forged a lifelong practice fusing Minimalism and performance, creating works in which he conceptually explores movement through methodical, meditative and often repetitive choreographed sequences. His longtime dealer, Angela Westwater, has organised an exhibition of Nauman’s new work, a six-channel video titled His Mark (2021) that engulfs the two-storey Lower East Side space with wall-sized projections, visible in 3-D form with glasses dispensed at the front desk. The installation shows Nauman tracing an X with his hands on a vintage table in his studio in Galisteo, New Mexico, a gesture that is repeated and visually manipulated in different forms in the various projections. According to Westwater, who has represented Nauman since the mid-1970s, the work was inspired by a history textbook containing the copy of one of various 18th century treaties signed by the Crown, the Canadian government and First Nations leaders, in which the chief of the Blackfoot Band signed his name with an X, a symbol used to authenticate documents in lieu of an anglicised signature."

Jeffrey Weiss reviews Bruce Nauman's new multi-channel 3-D video installation His Mark, 2021. 

He writes, "The hand in Nauman’s work has most recently been associated with learning—exercises, drills, the rudiments of knowledge. His Mark is no exception. But by extension, the recurring motif of the hand also directs our attention to studio practice—to making. The new emphasis on repetition and physical limitation or constraint recalls the early films of Richard Serra, especially Hands Scraping and Hands Tied, both 1968, in which hands perform acts of physical labor. In Serra’s case, these acts (scraping together a pile of wood shavings in one film, untying a cord that binds two hands at the wrists in the other) are at once pointless and urgent. The implication is always mindless frustration. Speaking of the films, Serra referred to his hand as a “device”; the term—tracing back to the work of Jasper Johns—recurs throughout the period, when it was used by artists (including Nauman) to indicate any simple tool directly applied to a malleable medium, a form of artmaking that was understood to put raw process before conventions of composition or craft. The body could serve as either medium or device or both, substituting for the cliché of the artist’s hand, a signifier of authorship as a demonstration of skill. The difference is that while His Mark is also process-based, Nauman’s return to the actions of the hand is a late-career reflection on making in relation to the self. Serra’s films deprive hand and task of their connection to an internal state, the life of the mind. Nauman’s hands are instead a metonym of agency. Marking is a threefold act of signing, drawing, and locating, the tentative designation—against the rotating tabletop, a continually unstable plane—of place."

Hams Saleh talks to Jitish Kallat about "Order of Magnitude," his new exhibition at the Ishara Art Foundation in Dubai.

Of Kallat's Epicycles works, Saleh writes, "This series began during the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic with a hand-drawn journal capturing minute changes in Kallat’s studio, which he lived in for a while to avoid infecting his family. 

'I started looking at things I probably never looked at, like a small crack in the studio wall. I started observing small tiny changes in my studio environment and keeping a drawing book of them,' he said.

He then populated the drawing book with images that come from the Family of Man exhibition organized by photographer Edward Steichen at the The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. 

The resulting prints combine the artist’s everyday observations with archival images of human solidarity taken by photographers from around the world. Composed on a lenticular surface, the depicted figures appear and disappear as one moves around the work, yielding a complex portrait of time."

Rain Phoenix interviews David Lynch for FLOOD's new Los Angeles Issue. Read the interview and view the full issue at the below link.

Murtaza Vali reviews Jitish Kallat's recent show at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "The “Epicycles” focus on images of care, celebration, community, and labor. Mothers, children, and couples appear frequently, as do doctors and nurses. Kallat uses lenticular lenses to make different figures seem to surface or disappear as one moves in front of each panel, this effect animating both the collages and the archives used to make them. The result is elegiac, a melancholic reminder of the social losses we have endured through the pandemic. Kallat covers the backs of these images with hand-drawn, quasi-scientific diagrams. The contrast between each work’s verso and recto encapsulates our current existential condition, pitched between an acute awareness of the vulnerability and joy of the individual human body and the manner in which this gets abstracted at the collective level into an unrelenting stream of statistics—enumerating case numbers, hospitalizations, and deaths—presented to us as infographics."

As part of a collaboration, Artnet News revisits Art21's Extended Play interview with Bruce Nauman from 2000 and highlights his current exhibition at Sperone Westwater.

Watch the video at the below link.

Wallpaper* includes "Bruce Nauman: His Mark" among the best New York art exhibitions.

Charles Schultz reviews Bruce Nauman's new exhibition at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "To be unsettled is a satisfactory condition for a Nauman installation. It’s a feeling that activates extra degrees of anxiety and anticipation, both of which can trigger a general heightening of one’s awareness, even perception. Think of the narrow corridors, sound-proofed walls, neon lights, slanted mirrors, and canted video cameras that characterize so much of his early and important work. His Mark is essentially a virtual corridor: it’s one six-channel video installation presented in three sets of two, and the viewer wears a set of digital 3D glasses to experience the rich volumetric bounty that the new technology provides. The corridor effect is a result of the peripheral vision you’ve given up when you put on the glasses, and it is heightened by the nearness of the subjects of your attention: the six screens are large and Nauman’s hands fill them up."

Vogue picks "Bruce Nauman: His Mark," as one of the exhibitions they are most excited to see in 2022.

William Corwin reviews Jitish Kallat's exhibition for The Brooklyn Rail.

He writes, "What is the future of drawing? Jitish Kallat has built the answer into a riddle: it’s flat but one can walk around it; it’s permanent and yet the images change; it is hand drawn and yet also a photograph. His three “Epicycles” (2021) are screens, but also billboards and signs—their heavy wooden frames and bases allow the drawings to stand independently—but they are concertedly flat and anti-sculptural. As we orbit them, the lenticular images on one side emerge and then disappear; a floating child vanishes, a ring of women in kimonos flicker in and out of the picture plane. The human element in Kallat’s “Epicycles” represent ephemerality, but he also includes branches, seed pods, fruit and spidery cracks which stay put—glistening behind the plastic ridges of the printing process but never dissolving like their counterparts. This series of monumental hybrid drawings are inspired by an intersection of Duchamp’s The Bride Stripped Bare By Her Bachelors, Even (The Large Glass) (1915-23) and Edward Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at MoMA in 1955. Kallat’s intentions are quite clear: the artist is angling to present an updated interpretation of Steichen’s unifying vision."

Read the full review at the link below.

The Chromologist talks with Amy Lincoln about her recent exhibition at Sperone Westwater. 

Tell us about your latest exhibition at Sperone Westwater.
The show includes 10 seascape paintings from this year. Each one is an exploration of color, whether a particular color (burnt orange, mauve) or a combination (I always limit myself to 3 paint colors plus white). The imagery is depicted in a somewhat flat, symbolic way, as opposed to naturalistically, with elements getting smaller in the distance to create space and depth.

Your latest work of seascapes is a departure from the landscapes in your early work, what inspired this change?
I loved how painting plants allowed me to paint lots of different colors and intricate details. But in recent years I found myself drawn to a more minimal aesthetic. I like that the seascapes are somewhat empty, but still give me an opportunity to depict lots of details. I am enjoying the limitation I set for myself, of depicting the same kind of imagery over and over again, finding a new way to paint it each time. 

Read the full interview at the below link and check out more of Lincoln's work at Sperone Westwater's presentation in The Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory 4-7 November 2021.

James Panero reviews Amy Lincoln's show at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "Amy Lincoln can be a master of gradation. Her paintings are well-wrought studies in stepped color and tone. At Sperone Westwater, in her first exhibition at the Bowery gallery, she made the most of her gradations through uncanny acrylic compositions that took deliberate steps across the spectrum."

Andrea K. Scott highlights Dingle's current exhibition at O'Flaherty's for The New Yorker's "Goings On About Town."

 

Ana Vukadin reviews "Bruce Nauman: Contrapposto Studies" at Punta della Dogana.

Vukadin writes, "Tucked in a corner of the top floor, meanwhile, is Acoustic Wedge (Mirrored) (2020), made for the show. This wallboard installation is covered in acoustic material and resembles a giant section of an accordion. Step in, and all sound – including your own footsteps – disappears. It becomes a temporary refuge from the cacophony emanating across the halls, until you gradually realise that even silence has sound: that some sound always trickles through as your ears adapt, and, should the erasure be so total, that there is always the sound of your own heartbeat.

Nearing eighty, Nauman refuses to be a victim of ageing as he perseveres in his quest for something sublime, pushing himself and his spectators into realms of discomfort, absurdity and, at times, countermanding beauty."

Jason Andrew reviews Amy Lincoln's new exhibition.

He writes, "The new paintings at Sperone, all ambitiously painted in 2021, are implicitly theatrical – extended variations on the painting-as-proscenium. While these new, invented visions seem frozen in the moment and thus at times unsettling, they embrace the unexpected through their highly stylized, even formulaic, design (one thinks of marvelously bewitching Roger Brown and Lee Godie). Each work expands on Lincoln’s unique use of high-keyed colors and sharp contrasting shadows, and her schematic juggling of imagery and dimensionality."

Edward Espitia discusses Luisa, a recent sculpture by Bertozzi & Casoni. 

He writes, "Giampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Dal Monte Casoni’s obsessive attention to detail and almost undetectable mimicry in their ceramic sculpture goes beyond deception. The hyperrealism of their work allows the viewer to interpret and absorb the meaning of the artists’ symbolism on a deeper level than just the appreciation of the exquisite craftsmanship."

Bookforum picks the season's outstanding art books.

David O'Neill writes, "Rockman has been imploring everyone to take the climate crisis seriously since at least the mid-1980s, when he first started showing. He’s expressed a precocious awareness of the catastrophe in large-scale, glossily perfect, surreally apocalyptic oil paintings, which combine a Museum of Natural History vibe with sci-fi/fantasy retro-futurism. The tone is scary, didactic, and droll. This new volume surveys the artist’s smaller-scale watercolors, field studies, gouaches, and oil drawings from the ’80s to the present."

Elaine YJ Zheng picks "Amy Lincoln" as a New York exhibition to see during Armory Week.

She writes, "Lincoln's atmospheric paintings explore light and refraction through expansive scenes spread across the canvas. The fluidity of the sea marks a departure from her earlier interest in landscapes. With a blend of colour and perspective, she brings permanence to momentary encounters: the vibrancy of the afternoon sun, the calm before dusk."

Alfred Mac Adam reviews "Wood Works: Raw, Cut, Carved, Covered."

He writes, "Shipwrecked on an uninhabited island, Robinson Crusoe decides he must build a fort to protect himself from nonexistent enemies. He needs no protection but feels he must place himself at the center of a circle with a wooden perimeter. His building material is wood, and both his need for enclosure and his circular architectural skills adumbrate the work of the 20 artists included in this wood-themed show.

A more overtly artistic avatar of Crusoe, Richard Long gathers broken branches (285 to be precise) during his perambulations through the Quantock Hills, home to Iron Age hill forts, and encloses them within a circle: Quantock Wood Circle (1981). This huge (192 inches in diameter), rarely seen work, constitutes an emblem of humanity’s relationship with wood. Like Crusoe, Long builds a boundary: outside is the chaotic universe; inside is the order he creates. Seen from above, the work could be a model for the human brain, with all its functions clearly delineated and interconnected to form a unique personality enclosed within a body."

The artist tells Hans Ulrich Obrist about the importance of zines, Covid sucking the life out of the streets of NYC and how he starts his day.

Artnet news writes, "Just five years out of art school, Amani Lewis has gained a long list of admirers for the artist’s portraits, which use digital imaging, photo manipulation, collage, and textile to create vivid images of the people in their community. It is not surprising, then, that Lewis is equally skilled at bringing together the work of other artists to create a show that serves as a snapshot of their creative circle of influence. Lewis, who lives between Baltimore and Miami, brought together the work of 13 artists, including Shaunté Gates, Ambrose Murray, and Khari Turner, for 'When Two or More are Gathered,' an exhibition on the art-sales platform LiveArt and on view IRL at Sperone Westwater in New York."

Marion Maneker and Angelica Villa discuss "When Two or More are Gathered."

They write, "as the art market emerges from isolation this summer, there appear to be a number of new forces at work. Auctions appear to have made a permanent transition to the hybrid format, with a live auctioneer taking bids from house personnel on telephones and the internet, while, on occasion, bidders are present in the salesroom. An obvious question for those in the primary market looms: Is there a hybrid version of the artist’s opening or group show? LiveArt, the private dealing platform, is experimenting with that today with the opening of 'When Two or More are Gathered,' a show of 13 contemporary artists curated by artist Amani Lewis."

Abby Schultz writes, "The artist Amani Lewis has curated an exhibition for the digital marketplace LiveArt that features physical artworks alongside related nonfungible tokens, or NFTs. This first show of primary market art for LiveArt includes an in-person exhibition of works by 13 young contemporary artists at Sperone Westwater gallery in Manhattan, all of which are available for sale through LiveArt Market beginning on Tuesday, June 29."

David Taylor talks to artist Alexis Rockman about his cover of the June 25, 2021 issue of Dan's Papers.

Alexis Rockman explains, "'The Whale Strikes Back' is the perfect cover for Dan’s Papers because it can remind us of the rich history of the East End of Long Island. Whales and whaling were a way of life for centuries, especially in Sag Harbor, where my wife and I have spent many wonderful years. Now, hopefully, we just want to watch and enjoy the whales alive."

Tim Escher writes, "As one of the most influential fashion designers of the 90s, Helmut Lang has always been a man of vision and his thinking follows a strongly utilitarian approach. In 2005, Helmut Lang left the eponymous brand he had founded and devoted himself to his artistic work with sculptures. In his work, he incorporates physical movements and states outside the boundary of the human body. Though difficult to do, Sleek has selected three of the most significant solo exhibitions from the complete oeuvre of Helmut Lang."

Nina Azzarello writes, "... we dive into the history of Sachs’ longstanding creative collaboration with one of the biggest sporting goods brand on the planet. few projects elucidate NIKE’s ‘better is temporary’ philosophy as effectively as the ongoing collaborative initiative NIKECRAFT. the endeavor has produced products since 2012, including iterative improvements to the popular ‘mars yard’ shoe and a shape-shifting poncho. underpinning every NIKECRAFT action is a transparent approach to doing, whether charting tests and trials or relaying evidence of construction methods." 

Bridget LeRoy writes, "What is it about shipwrecks that fascinates us so? Decades, even centuries, after boats have descended into the oceanic depths, books are written, films are produced, or, in the case of esteemed American artist Alexis Rockman, works of art are created, adding to the myths and mysteries of the ships that lie at the bottom of bodies of water around the world. Now 'Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks,' an exhibition at Guild Hall of East Hampton, looks at the vessels which traversed the world’s waterways as a mode of transport for language, culture, art, cuisine, religion, disease, warfare, and more."

Rachel Spence speaks with Bruce Nauman for Financial Times.

She writes, "Nauman’s influence on succeeding generations cannot be overstated. From early works such as “Self-Portrait as a Fountain” (1966-67), in which he captured himself spouting water from his mouth, to later pieces such as the video sequence “Clown Torture” (1987) — as disturbing as it sounds — and “Days/Giorni” (2009) in which voices intone the days of the week, not always in sequence, he has forged a reputation for art that is often bleak, sometimes bewildering, frequently very funny and always acutely perceptive of the human condition."

Laura May Todd reviews "Contrapposto Studies" at Punta della Dogana, Venice.

She writes, "Focusing on the American artist’s performative Contrapposto Studies, Bruce Nauman’s new show at Punta della Dogana, Venice, gives new meaning to body language."

Angie Wojak and Greg Herbowy interview the SVA alumnus about the ideas behind “Shipwrecks,” his path to becoming an artist and his time at SVA.

Rockman explains, "The shipwrecks genre is pretty loaded. What’s more exciting than a disgraced genre? It felt exciting and risky and there’s obviously so much room to go right and wrong. And the history of human activity is tied up in ships: They’ve been the primary delivery system of humans, diseases, agricultural items, stowaways, invaders, animals, and so on and so forth. So that all sounded right up my alley. And that was in 2017."

Andrea Whittle discusses her experience as a "wear tester" for Tom Sachs' latest collaboration with Nike.

She writes, "When I received an email about becoming a 'wear tester' for the artist Tom Sachs’s latest sneaker collaboration with Nike, a montage of physical challenges flashed through my brain: grueling runs through rough terrain, endless stairs in inclement weather, maybe even some rock climbing. But after the first Zoom meeting with Sachs and the other 149 wear testers, I quickly realized I had, in fact, been invited to take part in a monthslong conceptual art project."

Barbara A. MacAdam reviews "John Giorno" at Sperone Westwater

MacAdam writes: "The announcement for this deep, mystifying, mesmerizing, and witty presentation of word paintings (2011–2018), all silkscreen and acrylic on canvases measuring 48 by 48 inches, features the work SIT IN MY HEART AND SMILE (2017). Installed in a grid on the gallery’s main floor is a series of 12 black-and-white paintings—insistent, concentrated incantations and verbal outbursts set in a trademark font designed by Mark Michaelson in 1984. On the second floor of the gallery are four separate works in color. 'Art' is most certainly the center of HEART, and it’s Giorno’s own form of Buddhism, expressed in his distinctive visual language. (He was devout but exceptional.) The words are the embodiment of compression—the equivalent of the Buddhist mantra 'Om' designed to empty the head, or, in Giorno’s, case, to fill it."

Federica Pesce discusses "Les Citoyens," curated by Guillermo Kuitca for the Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain (in Italian).

Marie-Astrid Roy reviews "Les Citoyens" at La Triennale Milano (in French). 

"This spring, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) presents an exhibition of large-scale, hallucinatory paintings that tackle pressing ecological issues. Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks, on view in PEM’s East India Marine Hall from March 6 through May 31, updates and transforms the tradition of maritime painting to create powerful meditations on migration, climate change, and species extinction. Curated by Andrea Grover of Guild Hall in East Hampton, New York, the exhibition kicks off PEM’s new Climate + Environment Initiative which addresses our changing relationship to the natural world in order to encourage reflection, inspire conversation, and spark action. "

Julianna Thibodeaux writes: "What lies beneath? How do we balance our fear of the unknown with our desire to know, and what are the costs of knowing? Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks, originating at Guild Hall of East Hampton, NY, and now on view at the Peabody Essex Museum, conjures these and other questions—suggesting there’s a price to pay for our human interventions, and some forces are larger than we are. The ocean and its weather have sunk and stilled ships since humans set sail upon it, and generations of artists have both romanticized and mourned such dramas. Rockman takes a different tack—narrating tragedy from the perspective of its ecological toll."

At the invitation of Triennale Milano and Fondation Cartier pour l'art contemporain, Guillermo Kuitca presents a personal selection of 120 works from the Parisian institution's collection. From his unique perspective, the Argentinian artist stages installations, paintings, sculptures, ceramics, videos, and drawings to create a cosmogony composed of works, artists, animals, and objects where the human figure is often represented, in its relation to others and to the World. Exploring the idea of the group, the collective, the community through a wide variety of contemporary creations, most of which have never been shown in Italy, the exhibition offers the visitor a sensitive and surprising journey, rich in new aesthetic encounters.

In the first posthumous show of his work, JOHN GIORNO at Sperone Westwater includes individual works, his black-and-white series from 2011–2018, and John Giorno Performing I Don’t Need it, I don’t want it, and You Cheated Me Out of It, 1981 & Eating the Sky, 1978, a multimedia installation developed with his husband Ugo Rondinone.

John Soltes interviews Alexis Rockman about "Shipwrecks" at the Peabody Essex Museum.

“I spent many years making paintings about climate change, which I started over 25 years ago, so for me this is the most subtle and almost elliptical reference to climate change,” Rockman said. “But I can’t help it. It’s been on my mind for so long, and it is the crisis of our generation and the previous generation. … I can’t sit aside and just watch the world go up in flames or get flooded, so to speak, without trying to do something about it.”

With its roots in global trade, the Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) in Salem, Massachusetts is not short on paintings of historic shipwrecks. Artist Alexis Rockman’s contemporary spin on these paintings often relegates the sinking ship to the background, while the creatures affected by the voyages are brought forward to capture our gaze. Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks is on view at PEM through May 31. 

Nina Azzarello writes: "palazzo grassi – punta della dogana presents a major exhibition dedicated to american artist bruce nauman, focusing on three fundamental aspects of his oeuvre — the artist studio as a space where creation takes place, the body through performances and the exploration of sound. .... the show centers around a series of recent video installations developed by nauman in the last five years and related to a single channel video from 1968, ‘walk with contrapposto.’ the exhibition includes a comprehensive survey of that series alongside a number of earlier performances, installations and videos that provide context for the recent work. in further exploring bruce nauman’s life and work, palazzo grassi has also initiated a series of online video conversations that expand upon the themes of the exhibition. from now through june 17, 2021, the program of video talks invites artists, choreographers, art historians, performers and musicians — speaking with curators carlos basualdo and caroline bourgeois — to share their personal point of view on nauman’s work, and his influence on theirs. the videos that form bruce nauman archive for the future are uploaded on youtube and the website of palazzo grassi."

Andrea Shea writes on "How 'Eco-Warrior' Alexis Rockman's Trippy Paintings Of Shipwrecks Confront The Climate Crisis" in a review of the artist's exhibition "Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks” at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem.

John Yao reviews "John Giorno" at Sperone Westwater for Hyperallergic.

About the multimedia installation in the East Gallery, Yao writes, "This is Giorno at his best. He sets up your expectations and then pulls the rug out by not repeating a word or a phase just when you are expecting it, and shifting without warning. It is as if he mixed the mesmerizing repetition encountered in Bruce Nauman’s glowing neon masterwork “100 Live and Die” (1984) with the dissonant rhythms of Gertrude Stein’s prose poems in Tender Buttons (1914), while nodding to Frank O’Hara’s street smarts." 

TheGuide.art reviews "John Giorno" at Sperone Westwater.

The articles states, "On the surface this exhibition presents the paintings for which the artist is best known—upon further introspection it is a reminder that Giorno’s legacy remains in a place unto its own." 

Nancy Shohet West writes about "Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks" at Peabody Essex Museum.

She writes, "Earlier this month, the museum’s new Climate + Environment Initiative launched with the opening of “Shipwrecks,” an exhibition by Manhattan-based artist Alexis Rockman. Rockman’s paintings reimagine historic shipwrecks to symbolize the impact that the migration of goods, people, plants, and animals has had on the planet, with an emphasis on ecology and globalization."

Jonathan Goodman reviews "Peter Sacks: Republic" at Sperone Westwater.

Goodman writes, "Like the artists who shaped movements such as Constructivism and Suprematism, Sacks seeks to ally abstraction with social commentary, even a radical view. Here, the social implications of Sacks's outlook are linked to a complex collage of different sources of cloth: his materials come from all over the world, as if proposing a kind of internationalism that might be able to respond to the limits imposed by the isolation and xenophobia of many around the world, not least our own former president Trump."

Sebastian Smee reviews "Peter Sacks: Republic" at Sperone Westwater.

Smee writes, "Sacks’s larger canvases are big enough to create a sensation of immersion. Perceived peripherally, the elusive movements on the works’ surfaces seem to have their own implied velocity, like the famously hooked brushstrokes of Willem de Kooning (content “slippingly glimpsed,” as the Dutch emigre put it). And because they are freighted with their own history of making and use, they can function like aromas that briefly unlock troves of private narrative, only to die away. It is this surface speed, this glimpsing quality, that I love most about Sacks’s recent work, and particularly this latest show, titled “Republic.” It emerges from something deep, heavy and layered — more compacted and geological than oceanic. But it is what gives his work life."

Peter Saenger writes about "Alexis Rockman: Shipwrecks" at Peabody Essex Museum.

Saenger writes, "In “Shipwrecks,” contemporary artist Alexis Rockman turns his vivid, realistic style to scenes of cannibalism, ice, drifting animals and doomed men.The show, which moves in a larger version on June 13 to Guild Hall in the Hamptons, includes canvases and watercolors representing episodes from history and myth. One picture portrays the sinking of the USS Indianapolis, torpedoed by a Japanese submarine in the Pacific in the last weeks of World War II, including the shark attacks on surviving sailors. Another features threats that might have kept a Viking sailor up at night: ship-destroying whirlpools, threatening whales and the mythical sea-monster known as the Kraken, all about to overpower a small, fragile boat."

Will Heinrich reviews "Peter Sacks: Republic" at Sperone Westwater.

Heinrich writes, "Peter Sacks grew up in Durban, South Africa, during the anti-apartheid movement, and he’s spent many years in America as a poet and an English professor. One way he corrals these disparate cultural influences is by collaging scraps of cotton, burlap and lace, along with bits of wood, occasional pieces of written-on paper, and blue cuffs and collars on corrugated cardboard backgrounds. In “Republic,” the imposing triptych at the center of his terrific new show at Sperone Westwater, this technique makes the shifting boundaries and overlapping demands of a multiethnic republic — like ours, or like South Africa’s — feel at once grand and precarious. Two flag-like strips of highly patterned fabric, seemingly frozen mid-flutter, make the tension almost unbearable: When will they move?"

Ilka Scobie reviews "Peter Sacks: Republic" at Sperone Westwater.

She writes, "Poet, literary critic, political activist and Tribeca, NY resident Peter Sacks expands collage beyond any acknowledged borders. The South African-born artist’s body of work is as multicultural as it is magical.Author of five well-heralded poetry collections, Sacks has said, “I see my paintings as a cross between cave paintings, medieval frescoes, illuminated manuscripts and late 20th-century abstract paintings.” Hand-typed poetry is visible in the universes Sacks creates from African indigo cottons, antique Japanese silks, old embroidered linens, cardboard, and button-down plackets faded with wear." 

Tom McGlynn reviews Otto Piene's show at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "Multi - die goldene Stadt (2012) manifests much the same, but this time in gold, its grid organization emphasized by four horizontal bands of raster dot density. If not for the rigor and compositional discretion of the artist’s incremental gestures in these works, one might too easily be seduced by their luscious, almost glamorous, surfaces in platinum and gold. Such materials, though, serve perfectly to extend Piene’s metaphor of alchemical translation and transformation; notions of their material worth tend to fragment like the myriad tiny reflections on one’s own image in their glinting surfaces."

"Lost Cargo: Watercolors" is an Artforum Critics' Pick.

In his review Robert Becker writes,"The artist’s water-based media react with one another and the paper to create blooming, otherworldly compositions cloaked in luminous mists and liquid shadows—each picture seemingly touched by acid rain. And even though his fable-like cautionary tales, strewn with symbolism and humor, are executed more loosely here, they remain, as usual, monstrously potent."

Alfred Mac Adam reviews Alexis Rockman's show at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "Alexis Rockman’s medium for the 22 marine and submarine works currently on view at Sperone Westwater—watercolor and acrylic on paper—is paradoxical: watercolors are notoriously susceptible to moisture while acrylic paint, though water soluble, is waterproof when dry. So, the paintings are ephemeral and permanent at the same time, like nature itself. Actually, the entire show may be seen as a paradox. Rockman has, it seems, a message about environmental crises, the sea, and history to impart, but his method of communication is oblique, eschewing words in favor of mute images. These watercolors prove that Lessing was correct when he claimed in his 1766 essay “Laocoön” that there are limits to what we can express in either words or images. Words are great for narrating temporal sequences, but cannot express visual experiences; images can, but they cannot explicitly narrate."

Philip Kennicott discusses a recent installation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum that pairs Hudson River School painter Thomas Moran's Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone (1893-1901) with Alexis Rockman's Manifest Destiny (2004). 

He writes, "The Moran painting is an 8-by-14-foot vision of Yellowstone canyon and its beloved waterfall, blasted by sun through a roiling sea of clouds. The Rockman canvas, an 8-by 24-foot bleak, futuristic image of the Brooklyn waterfront, imagines the toll of global warming as ocean water submerges the city and makes a ruin of its infrastructure. These two works are now in dialogue, and the conversation — about our use and abuse of the natural world — is profoundly disquieting. Even more striking is the power of Rockman’s painting, which doesn’t feel like an ironic comment on the Moran, nor a pendant to it.

This is a dialogue among equal interlocutors, which suggests that large-scale landscape painting is still a vigorous form, especially in large public venues such as the Smithsonian, and it could play a vital role in how 21st-century Americans grapple with the destruction we are wreaking on the planet."

Amanda Gluibizzi reviews Bruce Nauman's exhibition at Sperone Westwater.

She writes, "In the projections, the studio is placed on a black ground, floating in a non-space that a friend referred to as the 'Bruce Nauman studio event-horizon.' This quality is made clear by the inclusion of Nature Morte iPads in Sperone Westwater’s elevator, which spontaneously encloses viewers with images while silently ushering them up to the second floor in a seamless transition that does not involve pushing any buttons or feeling the elevator move. In this instant, the limits of the studio are truly the limits of our world, and the experience can—during a time in which our awareness of being trapped in hermetic spaces is heightened—seem every bit as creepy as the whispered voice of Get Out of My Mind, Get Out of This Room (1968)."

Jason Farago reviews Bruce Nauman's new show at Sperone Westwater.

He writes, "Mr. Nauman is now 78. He would have every right to take it easy at his home in New Mexico or just tend to his horses after a lifetime of innovation that was summed up in a mighty retrospective two years ago at the Museum of Modern Art and MoMA PS1. (Another major retrospective has just opened at Tate Modern in London.) But he is not done with trying new things indoors, and a profound new exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery confirms how sedulously he is still pushing the studio’s limits."

Adrian Searle reviews Bruce Nauman's survey at Tate Modern, opening 7 October.

He writes, "However well I think I know Nauman’s art, and most of the works here, this pared-down survey of over 50 years of work continues to thrill and to disturb. I have no doubt at all of Nauman’s greatness, from his early, clunky black-and-white videos in which he is like a man trying to keep fit and to assert some agency in solitary, to a later sculptural installation, in which black marble cubes sit in the nasty pallor of yellow sodium lights, and in which minimalism is turned into a kind of authoritarian terminus. In the work Walks In Walks Out, a visibly aged Nauman walks in front of his own 2015 reworking of his 1968 video Walk with Contrapposto: here, Nauman reminds me of one of Alfred Hitchcock’s turns as a walk-on part in his own movies. Nauman the artist, like Hitchcock, is not above self-parody and humour, as well as being thoroughly uncompromising. Squeezing the most out of almost nothing at all he takes everything to the limit. And then some."

David Ebony selects Bruce Nauman's solo exhibiton at Sperone Westwater as one of his top 10 autumn shows.

Ebony writes, "Bruce Nauman reinforces his lofty reputation in this show of recent works that capture the disquieting disequilibrium of our present moment. On some level, the exhibition offers a continuation of Nauman’s long-term investigation of spatial relationships, and the body’s complex interaction with space and time. The fractured spaces and disjointed self-portraits that Nauman presents here also seem to metaphorically address the most acute forms of anxiety that, for many, mark the year 2020."

Charlotte Higgins speaks with Bruce Nauman about his Tate survey exhibition opening 7 October and his current exhibition of new work at Sperone Westwater. 

She writes, "[...] seeing Nauman’s art is to encounter a curious, questing mind, one that has restlessly experimented, over a four-decade career, with performance, film, video, sound, music, drawing, text and sculpture. Much of this inventiveness has been based on very slender means, often the materials to hand in the studio. Describing how a work might begin to take shape, he says: 'Sometimes a new piece comes from work I’ve finished, maybe even quite old pieces. I begin to see a part that I hadn’t considered, that becomes more important, and that develops into an offshoot.'"

Katie White reviews Bruce Nauman's new show at Sperone Westwater.

"But in his most recent work, Nature Morte (2020), the artist has gone much further, giving the public free reign to navigate his studio without his presence. Through three iPads, each linked to a projection, visitors can explore the space of his studio and inspect individual objects that Nauman has scanned.

'Nauman disappears, his body is absent, and the spectator becomes the participant or performer… Nauman recorded hundreds of images documenting all parts of the studio—notes from previous artworks, books, coffee cups, vinyl records, tools, photographs of horses, the sculpture Two Leaping Foxes, and more, for over a year,' noted Westwater, who said the work 'questions the conventions of art and the contradictions and ambiguities which characterize our existence in the world.'"

Andrea K. Scott reviews "Alexis Rockman: Lost at Sea," the artist's recent online viewing room.

Helen Stoilas looks at "The Things They Carried," Rockman's new series of watercolors.

"The artist Alexis Rockman has been thinking a lot about historical plagues since he moved from New York to Connecticut due to the coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic. He sees connections not only between the current emergency and past health crises like the Bubonic Plague that swept across medieval Europe, but with ecological disasters caused by human exploitation, such as the introduction of invasive species. 'It's interesting to contextualise what's happening in our lives, within the historical lens of the many times this has happened before,' Rockman says, 'and there's such an interconnectedness to habitat, biodiversity crisis and habitat loss.'”

Read the full article below.

In the latest edition of "The Art World Works from Home," Noor Brara interviews William Wegman to find out what he's been up to while working remotely from his upstate New York studio and home.

Read the full interview below.

MoMA pays tribute to Susan Rothenberg with remembrances by artists Amy Sillman, Guillermo Kuitca, Joan Jonas and Michael Singer and curators Christophe Cherix, Kathy Halbreich and Michelle Kuo.

In his tribute, Guillermo Kuitca writes, "A while ago, the New York Times published a story about some of most surprising moments in music, and included one from a late Schubert sonata, in which the music fades, giving way to a long unnerving trill. I can’t help comparing Rothenberg’s late painting Pianist Playing Schubert with the composer’s late piano Sonata in B-flat major. For me, there is no doubt that this is the piece being played in her painting. In the painting, the piano that I admired has also vanished, leaving us face to face with the pianist holding an impossible pose. This is not just one of Susan’s many wonderful paintings—it’s also one of the most surprising moments in art."

Read the full tribute below.

Phyllis Tuchman looks at Richard Long's history of walking and speaks with the artist about his concurrent exhibitions at Sperone Westwater and Lisson Gallery.

In a tribute to Susan Rothenberg, curator Ian Alteveer shared a few words on her work and legacy.

"I yearn to stand in front of Rothenberg's larger than life vista,  [Galisteo Creek, 1992], to revel in its flurry of unmistakable brushstrokes and vibrant color. Instead, I hold it close in my mind's eye—dreaming of that distant landscape and the remarkable painter who used to trek across it, viewing it perhaps with some trepidation, but certain in the knowledge that this strange terrain held in it the possibility to keep painting alive, sumptuous, and always present.”

Read the full tribute below.

Randy Kennedy penned Susan Rothenberg's obituary for The New York Times.

"Her first solo show in 1975, at the ragtag experimental SoHo art space 112 Greene Street, consisted of three large, scabrous canvases depicting the pared-down form of a horse cleaved by a vertical or horizontal line. The paintings arrived from so out of the blue that they shocked many who saw them... Though she had no special affection for horses or even horse paintings, she chose the form, she said, as something like a stand-in for the figure, in the way Andy Warhol’s soup cans served as symbols of pop culture, or Jasper Johns’s flags and targets represented what he called 'things the mind already knows.'”

Read the full article below.

In the New Yorker’s tribute to Susan Rothenberg, Peter Schjeldahl wrote, “In an era preoccupied with what to do in art and how to do it, Rothenberg addressed and answered a rarer question: Why? She palpably made the pictures not only because she could but because she had to. The historic upshot was a rebirth of Expressionism, with kinetic force and unmistakable authenticity.”

Read the full article below.

ARTnews honors the life and work of Susan Rothenberg. 

Alex Greenberger wrote, "Rothenberg’s paintings are spare and stark—frequently understated in their color palette and simple in their form. But through even the vague suggestion of figures, Rothenberg was able to create memorable images that tease the brain and tickle the eye."

It is with sadness that we announce the passing of artist Susan Rothenberg.

“Since 1987, I have been privileged to show Susan Rothenberg’s work and to experience close up her passion for and commitment to making art. As a pioneer, she extended the boundaries of painting—especially for other women artists,” says Angela Westwater, founding partner of Sperone Westwater.

Rothenberg rose to prominence in 1975 with her first solo exhibition at alternative art space 112 Greene Street. Consisting of three large-scale paintings of horses, it was heralded for introducing imagery into minimalist abstraction and bringing a new sensitivity to figuration. A group of her iconic horse paintings was included in “New Image Painting” at the Whitney in 1978, followed by “Zeitgeist” at the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in 1982, where she was the only woman included in a group of 45 artists.

Though often associated with this series of work, Rothenberg only painted horses for a short time in her career, and through the 1980s quickly moved on to explore other subjects, including heads, hands and other fragments of the human form, which morphed into a series of figures in motion–dancers, vaulters, spinners and jugglers. Rothenberg lived and worked in New York for nearly 20 years until 1990 when she moved to New Mexico with her husband Bruce Nauman. In this new setting, Rothenberg drew imagery from her daily life and physical surroundings in the New Mexico desert. Here she continued to draw upon her longtime ability to challenge and expand painterly conventions in her distinctive way of organizing pictorial space and her exploration of light, color, form and movement.

On the occasion of her exhibition at Sperone Westwater this past January, Alfred Mac Adam wrote in The Brooklyn Rail: “The only thing we can ask of this great artist is that she never stop working and never abandon the commitment to radical ambiguity that fuels our own creative and imaginative responses to her images.”

Photo: Susan Rothenberg, Photographed By Jason Schmidt.

Raphael Rubinstein interviews Guillermo Kuitca about his recent "Family Idiot" paintings, the shifting reception of Latin American art in the US, and his curatorial collaborations with the Cartier Foundation. 

Read the full article below. 

ARTnews covers Sperone Westwater's role as a partner gallery in Sotheby's new digital market place, The Sotheby's Gallery Network.

The Observer covers Sperone Westwater's new partnership with Sotheby's on their new digital selling platform, the Sotheby's Digital Market Place. 

Read the full article below.

Richard Long's MUDDY HEAVEN was chosen by Design Milk as one of the top 3 shows in New York to view online. 

"You can jump between floors and move through each room. That massive “Muddy Heaven” – with its six parallel bands meant to reference the Chinese I Ching hexagram for heaven… looks particularly great from the 2nd floor balcony."

Read the full article below. 

Sperone Westwater has proudly partnered with Sotheby's and seven other galleries in their brand new digital market place, The Sotheby's Gallery Network.

Read the full article below. 

Tom Sachs impliments NASA's I.S.R.U technique not only to enage with his instagram followers but also to solve problems in his everyday life.

Read the full feature below. 

The Guardian highlights one of Wim Delvoye's most creative works, a man named Tim who served as his human canvas. Three times a year, Tim goes to sit in galleries to display the work that was done in tattoo ink on his back. Even during this pandemic, even though the galleries are closed, Tim is still showing up to sit on display. 

Read the full story below. 

Alexis Rockman, Guillermo Kuitca and Emil Lukas were featured as two contemporary artists who have used this time in quaretine to be prolifically creative and produce new work. 

"Some poignantly expressed the existential fear and anxiety that have become a near-universal emotional state, while others found beauty in nature, joy in maintaining connection at a distance or humanity in the simple but profound act of creating."

See their full feature and new works below.

Tom Sachs shares his experience in quarantine and his 7 rules to live a creative lifestyle.

Read the full article below. 

Co-founder Angela Westwater was profiled in the April issue of Christie's Magazine on the occasion of Sperone Westwater's 45th anniversary. 

Robert C. Morgan of The Brooklyn Rail, reviews Richard Long's beautiful installations and highlights his unqiue practice that has delighted and inspired us for decades. 

"It is insightfully ironic that his two concurrent, large-scale, and extraordinary installations at Sperone Westwater and Lisson Gallery have been made inaccessible to the public at the time of this writing due to the unfortunate pandemic that has reshaped our living reality. As events have unfolded since I saw the installations, it has occurred to me that Richard Long is an artist whose relationship to nature is largely about healing, which involves opening the mind in relation to the body. "

Read the Full Article Below.

Nicolette Reim reviews Susan Rothenberg's recent exhibition for The Art Section.“Her most recent show at Sperone Westwater had, as usual, many surprises…. On a large, piano-shaped canvas, Pianist Playing Schubert seems constructed of parts trying to find their place. The musician’s face, in Goya darkness, is difficult to comprehend. Music has evaporated.”

Angela Westwater is featured among 8 creatives in her, "power salon", Sperone Westwater's library, that doubles for work and play as she describes.  

Read the full feature below. 

Richard Long, MUDDY HEAVEN, has been chosen as one of the most important shows opening in New York this week. 

"Richard Long is getting the full New York gallery treatment with two concurrent shows opening this week. The Turner Prize-winning artist is best known for his performative Land art works, which he enacts long, solitary journeys around the world, immersing himself in the land and creating works with local materials."

Read the full feature below 

Alan Crichton reviews Susan's Rothenberg's twelfth solo show at the gallery, "At Sperone Westwater on Bowery, Susan Rothenberg’s powerful paintings hold court on two floors. Upstairs, a large grisaille tree gains its authority from the bold strokes of paint that allow the painting to be finished while remaining dynamically in process. This conflict, held in suspension, generates enormous energy." 

Read the full article below

Javier Pes, discussed Richard Long's return to Mexico with his exhibtion "Orizaba to Urique River Deep Mountain High".  in Mexico City.

"The veteran British sculptor, whose extraordinary interventions into the natural and built environment take him to all points of the globe, has materialized in in the suburbs of Mexico City to create four massive works at Barragán’s oft-Instagrammed stable yard and home. Long has taken the commission in his rangy stride, unfazed by the pressure or baggage that intervening in such a famous spot might present. In fact, Long had never heard of the architect—a legendary figure in architectural circles—or seen images of the famous building before accepting the gig. "

Laura Hoptman reflects on the incredible and storied life of John Giorno. 

"John was a consummate and unforgettable performer, and a legendary reader of his own work who, with protean breath control and physical stamina, could recite his poems from memory no matter the length. (His mnemonic feats were, by his account, made possible thanks to meditation, which he practiced four hours daily for more than forty years.) John read not only with his voice and his distinct Noo Yawk inflection, but also with his entire body, having developed a repertoire of gestures that had a distinctly punk-rock energy. He electrified his audiences, bringing them to their feet even at the sleepiest of gatherings."

Read the full article below. 

Writer, Annie Armstrong, visits Tom Sachs' unqiue Rockaway Beach home as she delves into his inspiration for his upcoming film about surfing, Ritual. 

"The beach house that serves as its setting is a sort of Tom Sachs sculpture—an abode-as-artwork in the tradition of Kurt Schwitters’s Merzbau. The exterior is tiled with corrugated steel slats, fishing nets hang over the front from an observation deck, and the porch floorboards are made from old blue New York Department of Transportation barricades. Inside, storage places for nearly everything are labeled in Sachs’s signature scrawl: “spoons,” “paper towels,” “mugs,” “anal barbell” (the nature of that last one was unclear). A wall full of favored sustenance—cans of Heinz Baked Beans—bears teal labels that match the color of a Makita drill mounted over the kitchen sink." 

Read the full article below. 

Contributor, Alfred MacAdam, reviews Susan Rothenberg's twelfth solo show in gallery, "Susan Rothenberg has been showing in New York since 1975, when she displayed three large paintings of horses—traditional images of unrestrained passion. She has worked with Sperone Westwater for many years, but despite her longevity she remains a parsimonious artist, and has produced relatively few works over her long career. The only thing we can ask of this great artist is that she never stop working and never abandon the commitment to radical ambiguity that fuels our own creative and imaginative responses to her images."

Read the full article below

Daniel Maidman of Whitehot Magazine reviews, David Lynch, "Squeaky Flies in the Mud".

"The giant, mixed-media paintings (oil paint + x, it looks like, x being all sorts of cloth and teeth and whatnot), are dynamite. Again, Lynch’s narratives take place in a zone of psychosexual drama bubbling with threats, perverse desires, and sudden revelations."

Read the full article below. 

Artistic Director and Publisher of The Brooklyn Rail sits down in conversation with David Lynch. 

Read the full length interview below. 

David Lynch's work, Tree at Night (2019), was chosen by Artnet News editor-in-chief, Andrew Goldstein, as one of the 6 Best Best Art Works at this year's edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. 

Garbielle Leung reviews David Lynch, "Squeaky Flies in the Mud" and divulges into how his artworks along with his films create a unique universe that could only be engendered from the mind of Lynch himself. 

"Like his films, the co-creator of Twin Peaks portrays his scenes with surrealist undertones and an air of mystery, creating a divide between the body and the world it inhabits. “It’s gray and murky and it’s a cloudy kind of reality, but it’s one that, in many respects, I think also reflects humor,” explains Angela Westwater, co-founder of Sperone Westwater. “And I think there’s ultimately a kind of empathy in his work, particularly in the art from the studio.”

Read the full article below 

Miz Cracker visits John Giorno

"On September 17, Miz Cracker visited the celebrated poet and artist John Giorno (1936–2019) in his storied home on the Bowery to discuss Buddhism, inspiration, and his exhibition at Sperone Westwater Gallery."

Roman Kalinovski celebrates the ambiguity in the mixed media works that can only be attributed to the ever mysterious mind of David Lynch. A creativity that has kept his fans engaged for decades. 

"Such ambiguity is more celebrated in the fine art world, where artists are encouraged to maintain uncertainty around their work or be accused of being too illustrative. Viewers are not given any obvious keys to unlock Lynch’s work, and if there is any greater meaning for him, it’s inaccessible to anyone else. This mystery is what keeps his work engaging, and why so many fans turned out to see the show and attempted to meet him."

Caroline Elbaor explores how David Lynch how David Lynch has been a painter since the inception of his artistic career. His most recent show, Sqeaky Flies in the Mud is a collection of multimedia works that explore the breadth of his inspiration and talent. 

"The show’s title, “Squeaky Flies in the Mud,” is taken from one of the mixed-media paintings on view, and reveals insight into Lynch’s famously mysterious psyche. According to Angela Westwater, the work references “the organic phenomenon dating back to his childhood in Montana and Idaho,” where Lynch’s father ran the Boise National Experiment Forest, and where the artist remembers planting 500 trees alongside his father as a young Boy Scout."

Read the full article below. 

Conor Williams describes his "Lynchian" visit to Sperone Westwater to view the characteristically dark and gruesome work that has defined the ouevre of David Lynch's work for decades. 

"...You can head to Sperone Westwater Gallery on the Bowery and take in Squeaky Flies in the Mud, an exhibition of recent and brand new works by the maestro himself. The show consists mainly of his paintings and drawings, murky, muddy visions realized from worlds both real and imagined, although alongside them lie several lamps and a prototype for a so-called “lollipop chair.” On my way to the gallery, as I reluctantly sipped an unfortunately foul cup of coffee, a cold, gentle rain pushed down onto the street. A gallery assistant stepped out to greet me through a hidden door in the face of the building, materializing in the mist. It was…well, Lynchian."

Read the full article below.

Akrita Reyar interviews artist, Jitish Kallat, about his cotribution to India's pavillion at the Venice Biennale through his installation, Covering Letter. 

"Covering Letter links up to a part of my thinking where the past becomes like a resource for us to think about the present. There is a body of work preceding Covering Letter called Public Notice, which is a trilogy of works realised over a decade. In each of these works, a historical utterance from the past becomes a sort of insight to rethink where we are today. So, Covering Letter really came out of this desire to revisit this rather small, brief and yet momentous letter written just five weeks before the onset of the Second World War. It was dispatched by one of the greatest proponents of peace to one of the most brutal perpetrators of violence, the two cohabiting the planet at the same moment in time."

Read the full interview below. 

Adam Rathe interviews, David Lynch, on his return to painting after a successful career in cinema, and dives deep into his first exhibition in New York in several years. 

"What’s your practice like? Are you someone who paints every day?"

"When I'm into painting, I'm into that pretty much exclusively, but sometimes I don't have the opportunity to paint. So, when I get the opportunity it always takes me some time to get back into it—and that's a very frustrating time. I want to sink back into it, and it takes time. Then the ideas start flowing and I want to stay in there, but then it comes to an end for one reason or another."

Read the full interview below.

Grace Edquist interviews, David Lynch, on not only his return to paiting, but the expansion of his practice into several different mediums that are on display in his exhibtion, Squeaky Flies in t\he Mud. 

"The show at Sperone Westwater highlights this texture, pairing his large-scale mixed media with smaller watercolors and anthropomorphic lamp sculptures (which do indeed work). These are not pieces one can give a passing glance before moving on. Just as his films feel like their own universe, so too does his art work. There’s a whole story going on in each piece—“I call them small stories,” Lynch says back at the gallery. “To me, it’s a whole kind of world going on in the things.”

Read the full interview below. 

In an interview with Nathan Taylor Pemberton, Tom Sachs reflects on his show Timeline at the Schauwerk Sindelfingen and the creative process that can only take place in his Soho Studio. 

"The studio itself is a permanent collection of Sachs’ life – a vast inventory of art supplies, shop tools for every industrial need, handwritten labels (on every surface), and a spectrum of works-in-progress. It is a shrine to functionality, the most inviting mechanics shop you’ll ever visit. Every room is stocked with a telephone-book-sized McMaster-Carr parts catalogue, even the bathroom. When I first arrive, though, the artist is busy adding the final touches to a painting of Krusty the Clown while Future’s Purple Reign plays on the stereo."

Read the full interview below. 

Alina Cohen interviews David Lynch on the narratives that have defined his multimedia art practice for decades. 

"When I spoke to Lynch in the upstairs library at Sperone Westwater, I hoped for more clarity on his Billy character in the recent paintings. He sat across the table from me, sipping a fresh cup of coffee, with cigarette butts stubbed out in a small ramekin in front of him. A pleasant, smoky haze filled the room. “Billy can be different things,” Lynch told me, his sky blue eyes aiming at the wood paneling behind me. “In one thing, he can be one way, and you’d feel that. In another, Billy can be quite a bit different, and you’d feel that in the painting.” He met my request for further explanation with even more mystery. “Well, there’s a lot of people named Billy,” he said, “but they’re not all the same person. You know what I mean?”

Read the full interview below

Balasz Takac dives into the the surreal and experimental works of David Lynch as he prepares for his first exhibtion with the gallery, Squeaky Flies in the Mud. 

"By combing the avant-garde legacy of Surrealism and the experimental patterns of the post-war generation of the mentioned experimental filmmakers, with his own eerie Imaginarium Lynch constructed a distinct aesthetic full of suspense, freight, passion, and gore. Alongside the successful career of a filmmaker, he also acts as a visual artist known for equally strange and in some cases obscene works.

The upcoming exhibition at Sperone Westwater will present Lynch’s recent works (paintings, works on paper, watercolors, lamp sculptures, and furniture), the first at this gallery, and will once again underline his domains within the visual arts."

Read the full article below. 

Robert C. Morgan reflects on his visit to John Giorno's last show, DO THE UNDONE, before his passing. 

"Giorno’s taste was ecumenical. Whether dealing with the playwright Beckett, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, the “stargazing” filmmaker Andy Warhol, or the beat poet Allen Ginsberg, nothing could impede his interest and appreciation for their work. Giorno’s own practice was equally diverse. He worked assiduously in many domains—poetry, music, theater, printmaking, painting, film, sound installation, and sculpture—and collaborated with artists working in just as many disciplines. His work was contingent on both his passion and his precision, both qualities that are made immensely clear by the works on view in this current exhibition."

Read the full article below. 

Laura Nielson interviews artist, David Lynch on his upcoming exhibition Squeaky Flies in the Mud, and his foray into a multiverse of mediums. 

"His exhibition of paintings, Squeaky Flies in the Mud, opens at the Sperone Westwater gallery in New York on November 1. Featuring an eclectic collection of 30 mostly new works, the show offers paintings rich with dimension and texture, watercolors, sculptural lamps and more. From his home in L.A., Lynch spoke to WSJ. about his theories of painting and what he hopes to try his hand at next." 

Read the full interview below.

Guardian Writer, Oliver Basciano, eulogizes John Giorno. 

ARTnews honors the life and work of John Giorno. 

The New York Times pays tribute to artist, poet and New York legend, John Giorno. 

Andrew Russeth eulogizes John Giorno. 

It is with sadness that we announce the passing of John Giorno whose legendary influence as a poet stems from the expansive and multidisciplinary nature of his work. On 5 September, Sperone Westwater opened its first show of work by Giorno, including new text paintings, watercolors, and for the first time in the United States, bluestone sculptures carved with poetic phrases.

With a career spanning over fifty years, Giorno’s practice has grown beyond poetry to encompass film, painting, sound installation and sculpture. An early pioneer of the recorded word, Giorno is best known for his interactive telephone work Dial-A-Poem, first presented in 1968, and included prominently in Kynaston McShine’s watershed exhibition “Information” at The Museum of Modern Art in 1970. Giorno elaborated: “Using the telephone as a new media, I wanted to expand our conception of art and expose poetry to a public who would not otherwise be responsive to it. Also, much poetry is meant to be heard, not merely read.”

Speaking about Giorno and his legacy, Angela Westwater, Founding Partner of Sperone Westwater in 1975, reflected, “It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with John. I first experienced Dial-A-Poem in the ‘Information’ show at MoMA, so working closely with him for our exhibition has been rewarding beyond expectation. When installing his last sculpture, NOW AT THE DAWN OF MY LIFE, John explained to me that he wanted the space to be meditative and ruminative, but not somber. I think of this sculpture as an ode to his boundless creativity and zest for life.”

Thank you, John, for sharing your groundbreaking art, your captivating character and your dreams for the future.

Photo: John Giorno in his studio, 2018. Photo by Marco Anelli.

Norah Kleven writes on "Alexis Rockman: The Great Lakes Cycle" that has made its debut at the Weisman Art Museum in Minnesota. 

"New-York based artist Alexis Rockman’s murals offer a historically accurate view of the past of the Great Lakes as well as a cautionary, apocalyptic view of the future of the lakes — if humans don’t take action now. The detailed and crisp paintings are the result of more than four years of meticulous research."

Read the full article below. 

Helen Holmes highlights, David Lynch, filmmaker and mulitmedia artist who will be exhibiting new works at Sperone Westwater this November. 

"David Lynch didn’t become one of the most influential and beloved film directors alive by creating restrictions for himself, so it stands to reason that Lynch has cultivated a wide-ranging and consistent artistic practice outside of the movies. In fact, diehard fans probably already know that Lynch actually first trained as a painter at the Boston Museum School and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and that he has participated in a number of ambient music projects over the years. Earlier in 2019, Bonnefanten Museum in the Netherlands hosted a retrospective of Lynch’s visual art entitled “Someone Is in My House,” and later this fall in New York City, Sperone Westwater gallery will unveil a show devoted to new work by Lynch that will run from November 1 to December 21."

Read the full article below. 

Aaron Hicklin gets the opportunity to visit William Wegman at his Maine retreat, and dives deep into the special relationship between William and his Weimaraner muses. 

"We are in a large sunlit room in Maine, so far north that we are practically in Canada. Wegman has been giving me a grand tour of his lakeside retreat, a converted hotel from 1889 and an Aladdin’s cave of props and costumes that collectively make for an illustrated timeline of his long career. Below us, a lake sparkles silver through the trees. Two dogs – Flo and Topper – occupy a sofa, settling into poses that demonstrate the elegant form and posture that makes them such camera-loving subjects. Aged eight and seven, they are the latest in a line of Weimaraners that have fixed Wegman in the public imagination as dog whisperer supreme. As he points out, “They like to be tall, which is why it’s easy to work with them.” There’s often something a little discombobulating about them, especially when draped in full-length gowns or suits. They have canine features, but human affectations, like mythological creatures that exist in dreams."

Read the full article below. 

Ilka Scobie highlights John Giorno's iconic presence on the Bowery for over the past 50 years, while also analyzing the poet's transition from the spoken word into the diverse body of work that he has created for his fist show in the gallery, "Do the Undone."

"'Do the Undone'  his first show with  Sperone Westwater, expands his trajectory of using words from his poems in silkscreen and watercolors. The latest text silkscreens feature his epigrams on large scale varied rainbow backgrounds. A practicing Tibetan Buddhist, Giorno merges compassionate philosophy with a post-punk sensibility. Thus, phrases like “Life Is a Killer’ resounds from the poetic to the profane. The large striated rainbow pieces, acrylic on canvas, are sharp, concise and always transgressive."

Read the full article below. 

Savannah Whitmer features poet turned artist John Giorno while raving about his interesection of poetry and visual art. 

"Like his poetry, these pop paintings blast curt phrases and fragments like NOW AT THE DAWN OF MY LIFE and DO THE UNDONE. Primary statements cut to the heart of everyday imperatives and romantic sensibilities, and texts like LEAVE AS IT IS and GOD IS MAN MADE play with hazy spiritual contours brought to life against the artist’s largest rainbow canvases and stone sculptures."

Read the full feature below. 

"The SCHAUWERK Sindelfingen art museum in Germany recently launched a major retrospective on acclaimed American artist, Tom Sachs. Entitled “Timeline,” the sprawling presentation signals Sachs’ first monumental presentation in the country for over 15 years. A number of large-scale sculptures and bricolage objects are displayed throughout the exhibition rooms of the German institute that chronicle the artist’s decades-long career as a contemporary artist."

Read the full article below. 

Helmut Lang is interviwed by Annie Armstong as they discuss his ehxibtion of scupltures titled, "63", that recently opened at galley Von Ammon Co. in Washington D.C. The pair discuss his transition from fashion to fine art, sources of inspiration, and his relationship with other leading contemporary artists. 

Read the full interview below. 

John Giorno's solo exhibition DO THE UNDONE is featured in this week's Approval Matrix. 

See the full matrix below. 

Katherine McGrath takes us inside John Giorno's incredible loft on the Bowery that he has called home for over 50 years. 

"'Everything in my life happens by accident,' says Giorno one morning this summer, folded into an armchair in his third-floor loft. 'It was 1962 and I had just come back from seven months in Morocco, and a friend living upstairs [artist, filmmaker, and author Wynn Chamberlain] was using this as a storage place, and then he didn’t need it anymore. So I said, ‘Well, can I rent it for a month?’ Giorno recalls with a laugh. 'And that month became my life.'"

Read the full article below.

Phong Bui analyzes the parallels between the work of Malcolm Morely and Richard Artschwager in their current exhibtions at the Hall Art Foundation. 

"Despite the differences in Morley’s and Artschwager’s stylistic and material approaches, their treatment of plastic representation, case by case explores issues of the phenomenology of perception, memory and displacement, birth and death, manmade and natural environments, the news, consumptive culture, and above all anxiety, destruction and violence. Each carved out a unique synthesis of image and object: both relentlessly and restlessly interrupted the conventions of art—be it subject matter or how an artwork should look according to its surrounding space and the times."

Read the full article below. 

T Magazine Editor, Kate Guadagnino, features John Giorno, as "what to see" in New York this week. 

"The 82-year-old is still making new work and has a solo show opening tomorrow at Sperone Westwater, which is just a block or so from his Bowery studio. I was most excited to learn that it will include an updated version of Giorno’s 1968 work “Dial-a-Poem,” which incorporates recordings of spoken-word recitations; a push-button phone has replaced the rotary one, and bonus poems read by John Ashbery, Helen Adam, Eileen Myles and more have been added. There are also large-scale silk-screened paintings, delicate watercolors and several 2,000-pound bluestone boulders etched with pithy lines from Giorno’s own poems " 

See the full feature below. 

Ray Rogers interviews Helmut Lang about his sculpture, "twenty-two," at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton. 

"'twenty-two' was inspired by a grouping of fykes [long bag nets kept open by hoops], which appear all over the East End. They bring to mind a tribe or some kind of gathering or pagan ritual. They do also evoke the spinal column, and reference the scale of the human body, as I do in many of my works. It invites the viewer to consider the body less as a hierarchy of limbs and organs, but as a meshwork of equivalent and interchangeable elements. Examined closely, the kinetic work becomes distinctly biomorphic, changing infinitely depending on the variables of the surroundings."

Read the full interview below.

John Giorno, along with a host of other artists are included in Apple and the New Museum's new augmented reality collaboration.

"It was an ephemeral poem, with lines like “Catch the falling knife” visible for a few seconds through the portal of an iPhone pointed at the skyline above Central Park. This is a piece by the poet and performance artist John Giorno, called “Now at the Dawn of My Life,” that’s part of a new initiative by Apple called [AR]T — a curation of augmented reality art, featured in a series of guided walks."

Read the full article below.

"New York’s New Museum has teamed up with the tech giant to create experiential augmented reality artworks by an all-star cast of talent including Nick Cave, Nathalie Djurberg and Hans Berg, Cao Fei, John Giorno, Carsten Höller, and Pipilotti Rist. Any customer can walk into an Apple store, take out their phone, and use an app to explore one of the works, or sign up for a tour to get the full experience with a loaner iPhone." 

Read the full article below.

“William Wegman: Outside In,” an exhibition exploring over four decades of the artist’s fascination with the natural world, opened June 22 at Shelburne Museum’s Murphy Gallery in the Pizzagalli Center for Arts and Education. The exhibition includes drawings, paintings, portfolio pages from his handmade book “Field Guide to North America and to Other Regions,” and photographs of the Weimaraners, over 60 artworks in all."

Read the full article below. 

Paul Laster interviews Wim Delvoye about his recent exhibition at the Royal Musuems of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels. 

Read the full interview below.

"Pamela Polston reviews "William Wegman: Outside In" at the Shelburne Museum."

"The show's title, 'Outside In,' refers not to bringing Weimaraners into the studio — though perhaps it could — but to Wegman's long-standing relationship with the natural world."

Read the full article below. 

Jitish Kallat's installation Covering Letter (2012) was included in Artsy's roundup of "The Venice Biennale’s 10 Best Pavilions in the Arsenale and Giardini." 

"The crown jewel of the pavilion is an installation, Covering Letter (2012), by the Mumbai-based artist Jitish Kallat. Walk into the pitch-black theater, and you’ll find a glowing stream of mist and a projection of words flowing through it. Look carefully, and you’ll see that it’s a letter, written five weeks before the start of World War II, from Gandhi to Adolf Hitler."

John Martin Tilley interviewed Vincent Fremont, curator of Andy Warhol By Hand: Part II, Drawings 1950s – 1960s, for Office Magazine. 

"The historical drawing exhibitions have attempted to accomplish what this small, sincere show does effortlessly: to reveal an unseen side of an already beloved artist... Andy Warhol managed to keep it a secret that he drew at all, and his elegant, goofy caricatures feel like something Holly Golightly might have commissioned from a New Yorker cartoonist on a whim in the park, so crisply do these dulcet scribbles capture the fraught energy of the 60s. They reveal a delicate sense of line, an intuitive curiosity, and, most importantly, an impish sense of humor."

Read the full interview below.

Andy Warhol By Hand: Part II, Drawings 1950s – 1960s was featured in Town & Country Magazine. 

"Done in materials from graphite to ballpoint pen to blotted-line, the subject matter is equally diverse: selections of nudes, portraits of showgirls, still lifes of food, flower studies, sketches of handbags and shoes. Indeed, Warhol also seems to have been particularly keen on feet."

Read the full article below.

Liddy Berman features Andy Warhol By Hand: Part Two , Drawings 1950s-1960s in Architectural Digest. 

"Vincent Fremont, who worked closely with Warhol for nearly two decades, draws out a lesser-known side of the artist. 'People don’t see these drawings very often. And he did drawings his entire life.' These early works reflect the diversity of Warhol’s interests: Shoes and handbags commingle with showgirls, religious icons, and an elegantly drawn array of feet."

Read the full article below. 

Keith Estiler features Andy Warhol By Hand: Part II, Drawings 1950s – 1960s in Hypebeast.

"The exhibition is curated by Warhol’s close friend Vincent Fremont who also co-founded the Andy Warhol Foundation. Fremont’s curation focuses on 121 drawings made between the 1950s and 1960s, including portraiture, still lifes, religious iconography, and sketches made by Warhol during his travels." 

Read the full article below. 

Andy Warhol By Hand: Part II, Drawings 1950s – 1960s was featured in ARTnews' roundup of "9 Art Events in New York This Week." 

View the full feature below. 

The Japan Times featured Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony, on view at Tokyo Opera City Art Gallery through 23 June 2019. 

"For this exhibition, Sachs uses his unique style in a different approach to the Japanese tea ceremony. In a show of respect for the tradition’s precise rituals, he explores the significance and potential of Japanese traditional culture in a globalized world. Sachs’ installations use everyday and contemporary materials and branding in a reconstruction of the ceremony, keeping only the matcha tea intact."

View the article below.

The Brookyln Rail's Tom McGlynn reviews "Katy Moran: I want to live in the afternoon of that day," on view through 20 April 2019. 

"If one were tasked with coming up with a phrase that would roughly characterize Katy Moran's way of painting, then 'aggressive diffidence' might suit. In her case, however, it's a stance that projects a deeply powerful, perhaps even anarchic, energy. Another term that might be used to describe her approach to palette, gesture, surfaces, and supports might be 'subversive effacement.' Although Moran would appropriately be labeled an abstractionist, her imagery sometimes does allude to the pictorial, to landscape or still-life space specifically..."

Read the full review below. 

David Pagel reviews "Kim Dingle: I Will Be Your Server (The Lost Supper Paintings)" for the Los Angeles Times. The exhibition is on view at Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects through 13 April.

"The paint handling in Dingle’s oils on canvas is less reckless, slower and steadier. It makes for paintings that feel fleshier and less frenetic, as if they took place the morning after the party. Time doesn’t stand still in Dingle’s sensuous paintings so much as it whirlpools into an ever-tightening — and ever-expanding — vortex. Simultaneously inescapable and irresistible, her exhibition makes room for ambivalence."

Cate McQuaid reviews "Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton 1983-2014" for the Boston Globe. The exhibition is on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum through 2 June 2019. 

Read the full piece below. 

Design Milk's David Behringer reviews Emil Lukas's solo exhibition, on view at Sperone Westwater through 23 February. 

"The joy of viewing the art of Emil Lukas is not just the electric visual buzz of color and pattern, it’s also imagining the unseen process and performance of the thousands of decisions that are held in each work. If you’re in New York, it’s well worth a visit to all 3 floors before the show closes this week." 

Read the full review below. 

WBUR, Boston's NPR News Station, recently covered "Fire and Light: Otto Piene in Groton 1983-2014," on view at the Fitchburg Art Museum through 2 June 2019.

"For more than 30 years, the influential artist and educator lived and made experimental works on a quiet farm in Groton. Now the Fitchburg Art Museum is celebrating Piene's local roots — and his enduring relationship to light — close to home, in the largest U.S. solo exhibition dedicated to the breadth of his creations." 

Read or listen to the full segment below. 

The Rail's new editor-at-large Harry Philbrick talks with Emil Lukas about his new body of work, on view at Sperone Westwater from 9 January - 23 February 2019. 

"The thread and bubble paintings work with something all their own. Of course they must sister with Newton’s theories of light and color and Goethe’s evaluations of color’s emotional and psychological effects to color. I never see it as a law, instead these paintings continue to prove infinity in color and emotional relationships. A shift in any aspect of color (hue, tint, value) pales to the power of relationship. I think that’s why it’s important to work with the smallest measurable mark. A mark or single element that can be easily taken in as an individual. As thousands of these marks take location and the viewer takes distance, the painting accumulates into a complex system of shifting color and emotion. In this way color has physicality and any theory is unique to a specific practice. In short, nuance matters, with complexity of relationship it becomes highly personal."

Read the full interview below.

Sperone Westwater invites you to join authors Constance M. Lewallen and Dore Bowen at the gallery for a book signing event to celebrate the publication of Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters (University of California Press) on Thursday, 14 February from 4:30 – 6:00pm.

The first book devoted solely to Bruce Nauman's corridors and other architectural installations, Bruce Nauman: Spatial Encounters deftly explores the significance of these works in the development of his singular art practice, examining them in the context of the period and in relation to other artists like Dan Graham, Robert Morris, Paul Kos and James Turrell.

The Florida Times-Union's Charlie Patton reviews the new exhibition "Micro-Macro," which pairs paintings by Andrew Sendor and Ali Banisadr, on view at MOCA Jacksonville through 28 July 2019.

See the full piece below.

Anindita Ghose interviews Jitish Kallat on the occasion of his new exhibition at Galerie Templon Paris. “Phase Transition” is on view through 9 March 2019.

Read the full interview below.