Newest Reviews
U.S. Museum Exhibitions
The following guide to museum shows currently on view is compiled from Artforum’s three-times-yearly exhibition preview. Subscribe now to begin a year of Artforum—the world’s leading magazine of contemporary art. You’ll get all three big preview issues, featuring Artforum’s comprehensive advance roundups of the shows to see each season around the globe.
Rachel Whiteread, Study for Wax Floor, 1992, correction fluid, ink, and watercolor on graph paper. 17 7/8 x 12".
“Rachel Whiteread Drawings”
HAMMER MUSEUM
LOS ANGELES
Through May 2
Curated by Allegra Pesenti
Given the monumentality of her celebrated poured-concrete and plaster sculptures, few people would think of British artist Rachel Whiteread putting pencil or brush to paper. This survey brings into focus her variegated two-dimensional output with more than two hundred drawings made over twenty years (alongside ten sculptures). Not just mere studies, Whiteread’s drawings constitute a parallel practice that helps her to “dream” other pieces into being, and her use of gouache, correction fluid, acrylic, silver leaf, and collaged photographs evinces the artistic interests for which she is known: texture and surface, presence and absence, and the traces of human life in the material world. A “visual essay” by Whiteread, along with texts by curator Allegra Pesenti and the Tate’s Ann Gallagher, appear in the accompanying catalogue.
— Brian Sholis
Ceal Floyer, Overgrowth, 2004, medium-format slide, medium-format slide projector, dimensions variable.
Ceal Floyer
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI
MIAMI
Through May 6
Curated by Bonnie Clearwater
Ceal Floyer has a mathematician’s brain, a phenomenologist’s eye, and—belying the apparent reticence of her Minimalist-Conceptualist amalgams—a conjurer’s showmanship. Moving fleetly between formats (sculpture, video, drawing, photography, sound), the Pakistani-born, London-raised, Berlin-based artist specializes in elegant, witty, circular proposals that could almost be one-liners if they didn’t open onto questionings of perceptual habit and expectation. A bucket, seemingly catching a leak, conceals a speaker playing dripping sounds (Bucket, 1999); a performance is themed around stage fright (Nail Biting Performance, 2001); a bonsai is projected on the scale of a full-size tree (Overgrowth, 2006). This survey, collating some twenty works from 1992 through the present, accordingly promises plenty of practiced bait-and-switch, with cerebral pleasure giving way to rippling disquiet.
— Martin Herbert
Cory Arcangel, CA 09 photoshop CS 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient “Yellow, Violet, Red, Teal” mousedown y=16450 x=10750, mouse up y=18850 x=206002009, 2009, color photograph, 110 x 72".
“Cory Arcangel: The Sharper Image”
MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, MIAMI
MIAMI
Through May 6
Curated by Ruba Katrib
Keep your Ray-Bans on: This solo museum show presents nearly thirty of Cory Arcangel’s multimedia works, which always appear to radiate a liquid-crystal halation. Glowing cyan Nintendo projections, C-prints of Photoshop’s slick color gradient, and unsightly 1990s HTML palettes are sure to add to the shine. But the artist’s slow burn follows a precise logic. He purposefully feeds various display technologies through different levels of time and skill, producing retro “structural films” made via consumer-friendly video software or splicing YouTube clips of cats walking on pianos so that they “play” a serial Schönberg tune. Coinciding with the final weeks of an exhibition at the University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, this survey will include several new and rarely exhibited works. Arcangel’s puckish mix of futurity and obsolescence seems only to be getting brighter.
— Michelle Kuo
Luc Tuymans, Der Diagnostische Blick V (The Diagnostic View V), 1992, oil on canvas, 22 7/8 x 16 1/2".
Luc Tuymans
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through May 2
Curated by Madeleine Grynsztejn and Helen Molesworth
After almost twenty-five years of mature production, Luc Tuymans’s reputation precedes him, and the contours of his artistic accomplishment are finally coming into focus. With his muted palette and pared-down painterly vocabulary, the Belgian artist has developed a personal yet remarkably resonant practice that embraces the limits of perception and communication while arguing vehemently for his medium as a vital, critical art form. As large as Tuymans looms in contemporary painting conversations, however, this seventy-work retrospective, which unites long-separated series and is accompanied by a catalogue with essays by Bill Horrigan and Joseph Leo Koerner, among others, is his first substantial American showing, but it promises to make up for lost time with unprecedented depth.
— Jordan Kantor
Renée Green, Space Poem 2, 2008, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich.
Renée Green: Endless Dreams and Time-Based Streams
YERBA BUENA CENTER FOR THE ARTS
SAN FRANCISCO
Through June 20
Curated by Betti-Sue Hertz
The conceptual currents within Renée Green’s twenty-year practice gain force from the cyclical return to prior installations, as each reconfiguration condenses a multitude of ambient identities grounded in global histories, feminism, identity politics, and fiction. One of the two recent projects that make up this show, Endless Dreams and Water Between, 2009, commissioned for the National Maritime Museum in London, blends meditations on oceans and memories, uncertainties and desires, in film and sound works, banners, diagrams, and drawings. Also on view is United Space of Conditioned Becoming, 2007, an assemblage of many previous works. Here travel is a metaphor and an actuality, evidenced in videos documenting Green’s peripatetic activities, while banners serve up a matrix of quotations and aphorisms that frame the streaming dialogic and informational flow that’s been building throughout her career.
— Jan Avgikos
Henri Cartier-Bresson, Los Angeles, 1960, gelatin silver print, 8 x 13 11/16". Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, Paris. © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
SAN FRANCISCO MUSEUM OF MODERN ART
SAN FRANCISCO
Through January 30 2011
Curated by Peter Galassi
Long canonized through his street photographs’ articulation of the “decisive moment,” pioneering photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson is now the subject of a three-hundred-print retrospective. Although he documented many of the social shifts around the world between the 1930s and the ’70s, it is primarily his portrait of the quotidian life of postwar Europe, imbued with charm and sentiment, that has seemingly endured. The exhibition’s inclusion of his reportage from China, India, and elsewhere promises to expand our understanding of his oeuvre, but it is just one of the opportunities the show offers to renew HCB’s legacy in a present whose most innovative photography is premeditated and straddles fact and fiction.