Category Archives: Reviews

Review: Paw @ Arcade Fine Arts

How Long Does It Take to Work? Picture this: you’ve been hitting the gym consistently, following a strict diet, and putting in the effort to build muscle and improve your physique. But despite all your hard work, you’re not seeing the results you desire. Could there be something missing from your routine? Something that could […]

Review: Theaster Gates @ White Cube Gallery

Daily Serving has just published my review of the Theaster Gate’s new show, Freedom of Assembly, now up at White Cube Gallery‘s Bermondsey site. Freedom of Assembly is Theaster Gates’ second solo exhibition with London’s White Cube Gallery. Having won the Artes Mundi prize in January, Gates is currently receiving praise for his installation at this year’s […]

Review: New Image Painting @ Shane Campbell Gallery

What are Replica Watches? Before we dive into the legal intricacies, let’s define what replica watches are. Replica watches are imitation timepieces designed to look like high-end luxury watches. They are often manufactured to closely resemble the original, often with identical logos, designs, and even packaging. While they may look the part, they are not […]

David Schutter @ Rhona Hoffman Gallery

I reviewed David Schutter’s show, What is Not Clear is Not French, up now at Rhona Hoffman Gallery. The strongest tension in David Schutter’s paintings is between their historical referents and their contemporary interpretation. While the abstract drawings wear their history plainly in academic marks and moves, it is impossible to see Schutter’s paintings without the […]

Evan Gruzis @ The Suburban

Daily Serving has just published my review of Evan Gruzis’ new show, Shell Game, currently up at The Suburban. The works in Shell Game represent a major departure for Gruzis, whose earlier work used intensive ink washed to create hazy, funky riffs on the objects and places that make up a kind of pop-culture landscape by way of […]

Sofia Leiby @ Devening Projects + Editions

Last week I reviewed Sofia Leiby‘s show at devening projects + editions, which ran from December 15th through January 18th, alongside Peter Fagundo‘s Model Questions for the Sun, the See, and Other Things…. Here Leiby’s impulses, if not her paintings themselves, enter into the active discourse on postindustrial labor as experienced in today’s network economy. Creative […]

An Unnatural Theatre @ Aid & Abet

When I first planned to spend six months after graduate school in the United Kingdom, I expected to be living in London or commuting there regularly. However, with train fares nearly five times the cost as in the US, I quickly faced a deflated travel budget and few choices for art in my base in […]

Ian Hetherington, Owen Piper, & Jacob Kerray @ CCA

While Glasgow’s The Modern Institute is still more of a gallery than an institution proper, and though the Glasgow School of Art is key for student life, I found the Center for Contemporary Art at the heart of the city’s support structure for professional artists. With three galleries, studios, a library, performance rooms, and discussion […]

Manfred Pernice @ The Modern Institute

The Modern Institute is a must-visit gallery in Glasgow, Scotland. With ties to artists as diverse as Chris Johanson, Urs Fischer, or  Cathy Wilkes, the Institute hosts quarterly exhibitions with enough hands-off curation to allow real focus on a single artist’s crafted imagination. When I visited the city in August, I was able to see […]

Minna H. Lappalainen: Notes on Architecture @ Tegnerborbundet

Who doesn’t love Modernist architecture? Earlier this month I wrote about Cyprien Gaillard’s meditations on this font of  relevancy, looking back on a time when it was believed that, in Dominic A. Pacyga’s words, “good planning, big government,  and modern architecture could solve the problems of [a] city”. Immediately historical, hubristic, and utopian, these structures […]

From Wings to Fins: Morris Louis & Cyprien Gaillard @ Sprüth Magers

Last week I reviewed the latest exhibition at London’s Sprüth Magers gallery, Morris Louis and Cyprien Gaillard‘s From Wings to Fins. Drawn to modernism’s ideals, contradictions, and historical failures, Gaillard has risen on his ability to seek out and create tensions between stability and precarity, utopia and ruin, beauty and entropy, memory and amnesia. In the past, […]

Long Ago and Not True Anyway @ Waterside Contemporary

Last week I reviewed Long Ago and Not True Anyway at London’s Waterside Contemporary. The group exhibition featured work from Slavs and Tatars, Meikitar Garabedian, Joana Hadithomas and Khalil Joreige, Rabih Mroué, and Libia Castro and Ólafus Ólafsson. In Long Ago and Not True Anyway at Waterside Contemporary, curator Pierre d’Alancaisez explores a kind of history that exists beyond the dry […]

Aquatopia @ Nottingham Contemporary

I recently stopped by Nottingham Contemporary to see their new exhibition Aquatopia. I thought it was among the best museum show’s I’ve ever seen, and wished I could have come back for another bite. It has been a big year for Nottingham Contemporary. After receiving a boost of notoriety by way of Mark Leckey’s The Universal Addressability of Dumb […]

Cheryl Pope: Just Yell @ Monique Meloche Gallery

A few days before I took off for the UK, I was able to swing by Monique Meloche Gallery for the opening of Cheryl Pope‘s Just Yell. The exhibition was conflicting – both perfectly topical and, at times, pointless – but touched on plenty of frustrations, civic and aesthetic. During the first weekend of the season, a […]

Raquel Ladensack @ Alderman Exhibitions

Ellen Hartwell Alderman has spent the last few months working on an independent art space. Located near the corner of Ogden and Carroll, and with a dual curatorial focus on art and architecture, the aptly titled Alderman Exhibitions is a welcome addition to the group of more professional alternative spaces such as 65Grand and Devening Projects + […]

Deb Sokolow @ Western Exhibitions

Drawing and painting often get lumped together as sister media, as if both were equal means of manual image creation, one only wetter than the other. I think of the two as more different than that. Where painting came into its own as method of image production, drawing has a less aesthetic history as a […]

Top Five Shows of the Year That I Went To (2010)

Here are this year’s top five shows that I went to during 2010, judged on which I remember enjoying best or which were significant to my year, followed by five more shows I really liked. Sorry for all the good shows I missed; I’ll try to catch more next year! 1) New Icon @ LUMA […]

Karl Haendel @ Tony Wight Gallery

Karl Haendel has a CV peppered with prestige – he has shown in excellent spaces and biennials, won excellent awards, and has work in the public collections of MoMA, MoCA, and Guggenheim to name a few. If the bounce toward of tight graphite appropriation and reproduction in high art wanted a figurehead, Haendel would make a […]

Opening Weekend Reviews / Impressions, with guests Pedro Vélez and Erik Wenzel

For this year’s opening weekend, I invited two other artists/writers to join me in writing up short impressions of everything we saw. The first is Erik Wenzel, who writes mostly for ArtSlant, blogs at Art or Idiocy?, and who has an exhibition at Harold Washington College coming up on September 30th. The second is Pedro […]

Carrie Gundersdorf @ Julius Caesar

Abstract composition is hard in 2010. Off-the-head, sourceless abstraction relying on internalized visual patterns and analytics cuts too close to expressionism for some, while sourced, referential abstraction can bring up a language problem related to the source’s content. Chicago artist Carrie Gundersdorf goes for the latter option, sourcing her abstract paintings and drawings from technologically removed nature. The […]