Author: Editor

Screens

Wartime and time warps in Obayashi’s Labyrinth of Cinema

Contributed by Paul DAgostino / Nobuhiko Obayashis film Labyrinth of Cinema is, as billed, broadly, profoundly, and provocatively about war. He is best known for his epic War Trilogy. At the same time, the storied Japanese filmmakers final film completed not long before he passed away at the age of 82 in April 2020 is also a visually dazzling, pan-historical account of the ways and reasons for which films are made, viewed, critiqued, and recalled.

Museum Exhibitions

Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Artist of Everything

Contributed by Laurie Fendrich / Singling out individual works for praise in an exhibition of the size and range of MoMAs Sophie Taeuber-Arp: Living Abstraction is almost beside the point. Her first US retrospective in 40 years, it includes 300 of her approximately 1,200 extant works: pencil drawings, gouache

Conversation

A conversation with William Eckhardt Kohler

Contributed by Rachel Youens / While preparing for this conversation with William Eckhardt Kohler, who recently had a solo at Catskills Gallery in Tribeca, I noticed that in his earlier work, he occasionally portrayed figures who were sleeping or dreaming. When I visited the show, I realized how deeply the theme of the dream went through his work.

Solo Shows

RJ Messineo: Existential magic

Contributed by Rick Briggs / Gold Gold, RJ Messineos second solo exhibition at CANADA, is both a cohesive and a dynamically exciting effort. They make abstract paintings, often irregularly shaped, with plywood panels that are attached to the canvas with strong, rare-earth magnets.

Solo Shows

Annette Hur: Painful, elegant mortality

Contributed by James J.A. Mercer / There is an undeniable lushness to the paintings and textiles in Annette Hurs solo show Watching from the Other Side at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea. Elegant shapes shine through dappled light and leaves. Oils blur, drip, or dive across the surface at wild angles. But discolorations and deformations suggest that something is unresolved, something is in process.

Studio Visit

Lisa Hoke’s unconfined vision

Restricted to her studio during lockdown and cut off from large spaces in which to create site-specific work, Lisa Hoke felt the need to fashion pieces that were more portable and more presumptively permanent. What resulted is a scintillating revelation.

Solo Shows

Ann Schaumburger: The shape of home

Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Ann Schaumburger is a disciplined and systematic painter. She uses basic geometric motifs (triangle, rectangle, and square) to develop permutations of a core set of four brilliant colors that elaborate the intuitive resonance of a single structure: the gabled roof house. Works recently on view at A.I.R. Gallery draw on miners stone houses in Cornwall, England, and prefabricated metal sheds in Amherst, Virginia. The idea of a home, however schematic, evokes real-world associations, establishing a rich and subtle balance between form and content.

Group Shows

Virtuous tension at Underdonk

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / Lockdown called for the safety and comfort of an inner sanctum, but that of course produced the urge for unmediated exposure to nature. In curating Nice to See You Again, now up at Underdonk in Bushwick, Leonora Loeb and Keisha Prioleau-Martin set about finding art that captured that virtuous tension. They have succeeded, presenting varied but thematically harmonious work by ten artists, each of them in some way conveying the hibernation and re-emergence implied in the exhibitions amiable but also multivalent title.

Solo Shows

A Two Coats Conversation with Stephen Westfall

Stephen Westfall has engaged with geometric abstraction in singularly rich and sophisticated ways for more than thirty years, never complacent but always considered. Last week, I had the opportunity to talk with him at Alexandres new Lower East Side space, where his work is on view through December 22.

Solo Shows

Devra Fox’s eccentric realism

Contributed by Jonathan Goodman / Devra Foxs thirteen graphite drawings on view at Hesse Flatow in Chelsea, two blue and the rest gray, depict structures organic in presentation but with an eerie resemblance to manmade objects such as furniture.

Gallery shows

Vancouver: Trying to see the sea, like fathoming love and the unconscious

Contributed by Dion Kliner / Situated in Vancouvers original Chinatown, the Sun Wah Center has been an artistic hub housing a diverse cross section of the cultural community since 2016. In the Centers windowless basement, the Canton-sardine Gallery is isolated from street noise and has no natural light. For Kristin Mans, A-MARE to love-to sea, the gallery had been submerged in a deep violet-blue light and the sound of water that spilled into the hallway….