AUSTRALIA

ANNA PAPPAS GALLERY
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ewen Coates, Paolo Consorti, Sue Dodd, Michaela Gleave, Sam Grigorian, Ernesto Rios

ANNA SCHWARTZ GALLERY
Melbourne and Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ian Burns, Daniel Crooks, Dale Frank, Shaun Gladwell, Antony Gormley, Clement Meadmore, Angelica Mesiti, Mike Parr, Yinka Shonibare MBE, Daniel von Sturmer

AUSTRALIAN GALLERIES
Melbourne and Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: George Baldessin, G.W. Bot, Arthur Boyd, Jasper Knight, Kerrie Lester, Kevin Mortensen, Sidney Nolan, Rodney Pople, Jeffrey Smart

CHARLES NODRUM GALLERY
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: David Aspden, Sydney Ball, Andrew Christofides, Mark Galea, James Gleeson, Peter Kaiser, Ruark Lewis, Elwyn Lynn, Paul Partos, Edwin Tanner

CONNY DIETZSCHOLD GALLERY
Sydney, Australia; Cologne, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Victor Bonato, Markus Baldegger, Chun Kwang Young, Craig Easton, Franz Ehmann, Carlos Estrada-Vega, Pollyxenia Joannou, Geoff Kleem, Liang Quan

DIANNE TANZER GALLERY + PROJECTS
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Roy Ananda, Michael Cook, Marian Drew, Juan Ford, Neil Haddon, Izabela Pluta, Victoria Reichelt, Yhonnie Scarce

GREENAWAY ART GALLERY
Adelaide, Australia; Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Peter Atkins, Mat Collishaw, Adam Cullen, Ariel Hassan, Paul Hoban, Nasim Nasr, Deborah Paauwe, Santiago Sierra, Darren Siwes, Jenny Watson

IAIN DAWSON GALLERY
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Liam Benson, Seth Birchall, Minka Gillian, Lucas Grogan, Celia Gullett, Tim Roodenrys, Kevin Tran

MARTIN BROWNE CONTEMPORARY
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Giles Alexander, Peter Atkins, Andrew Browne, Michael Cusack, Paul Dibble, Troy Emery, Brent Harris, Linde Ivimey, Tim Maguire, Baden Pailthorpe, Savanhdary Vongpoothorn, Guan Wei

MCLEMOI GALLERY
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Daniel Arsham, Rhonda Dee, Friends With You, Luis Gispert, Sarah Harvie, Guy Martin, Diego Singh, Alexandra Standen

MICHAEL REID
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Jason Benjamin, Marc Blake, Kim Buck, Julie Dowling, Marian Drew, Stephen Hart, Danie Mellor, Catherine Nelson, Deborah Paauwe, Freddie Timms, Samuel Tupou, Regina Wilson

NELLIE CASTAN GALLERY
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Annette Bezor, Chris Bond, Bindi Cole, Wayne Eager, Prudence Flint, Marc Freeman, Pei Pei He, Gordon Hookey, Deborah Paauwe, Polixeni Papapetrou, David Ray, Darren Siwes, Darren Wardle

NEON PARC
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Dan Arps, Janet Beckhouse, Damiano Bertoli, Trevelyan Clay, Julian Dashper, Irene Hanenbergh, Katherine Huang, Josey Kidd Crowe, the Kingpins, Paul Knight, James Lynch, Rob McLeish, Viv Miller, Elizabeth Newman, Elizabeth Pulie, Noël Skrzypczak, John Spiteri

OLSEN IRWIN
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Stephen Bird, Peter Booth, Paul Davies, Tamara Dean, Nicholas Harding, Amanda Marburg, Prue Venables

PHILIP BACON GALLERIES
Brisbane
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Charles Blackman, Robert Brownhall, Peter Churcher, Ray Crooke, Lawrence Daws, Donald Friend, William Robinson, Margaret Olley Estate, Garry Shead, Jeffrey Smart, Tim Storrier, Gordon Shepherdson, Fred Williams Estate

ROSLYN OXLEY9
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Hany Armanious, Daniel Boyd, Yayoi Kusama, Tracey Moffatt, David Noonan

For the last three decades, Roslyn Oxley9 has championed the work of Australian artists internationally, bringing to prominence talents such as Bill Henson, Tracey Moffatt, and David Noonan. Established in 1982, the gallery maintains a focus on the Asia-Pacific region with an emphasis on artists from Australia, New Zealand, and Japan. Memorable shows from the past year include new hyperreal sculptures and a new video by Australian artist Patricia Piccinini, as well as a multifaceted installation by Noonan.

SAVILL GALLERIES
Sydney
Focus: Australian paintings
Artists: Charles Blackman, Arthur Boyd, Leonard French, James Gleeson, Sidney Nolan, Margaret
Olley, John Olsen, Tim Storrier, Brett Whiteley, Fred Williams Estate

STILLS GALLERY
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary photography and multimedia art
Artists: Pat Brassington, Brenda L Croft, Ian Dodd, Merilyn Fairskye, Anne Ferran, Petrina Hicks, Ricky Maynard, Anne Noble, Polixeni Papapetrou, Michael Riley, Justine Varga

SULLIVAN + STRUMPF FINE ART
Sydney
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Tony Albert, Sydney Ball, Penny Byrne, Marc de Jong, eX de Medici, Juan Ford, Sam Jinks, Joanna Lamb, Sam Leach, Laith McGregor, Darren Sylvester, TextaQueen

TOLARNO GALLERIES
Melbourne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Brook Andrew, Benjamin Armstrong, Peter Atkins, Martin Bell, Andrew Browne, Louise Hearman, Peter Hennessey, Bill Henson, Brendan Huntley, Tim Johnson, Anastasia Klose, Rosemary Laing, Tim Maguire, Patricia Piccinini, Ben Quilty, Caroline Rothwell, Judy Watson

NEW ZEALAND

HOPKINSON CUNDY
Auckland
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Nick Austin, Andrew Barber, Fiona Connor, Daniel Malone, Nicholas Mangan, Tahi Moore, Peter Robinson

MICHAEL LETT
Auckland
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Hany Armanious, Steve Carr, Shane Cotton, Simon Denny, Michael Parekowhai, Sriwhana Spong

STARKWHITE
Auckland
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Billy Apple®, Martin Basher,
Phil Dadson, Alicia Frankovich, Glen Hayward, Jin Jiangbo, Jae Hoon Lee, Seung Yul Oh, Layla Rudneva-Mackay, Clinton Watkins

AUSTRIA

ARTELIER CONTEMPORARY
Graz
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Vito Acconci, John Armleder, John Baldessari, Thomas Bayrle, Cosima von Bonin, Monica Bonvicini, Günther Förg, Kendell Geers, Thilo Heinzmann, Leiko Ikemura, Louise Lawler, Jonathan Monk, Matt Mullican, Tobias Rehberger, Kiki Smith, Franz West

CHARIM WIEN
Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Maja Bajević, Ivan Bazak, Erwin Bohatsch, VALIE EXPORT, Dorothee Golz, Stephan Huber, Franziska Klotz, Roberta Lima, Robert Muntean, Andreas Reiter Raabe, Christoph Schlingensief, Wolfgang Wirth, Jens Wolf, Qiu Zhijie, Ralf Ziervogel

CHRISTINE KOENIG GALERIE

Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Adel Abdessemed, Ai Weiwei, Pierre Bismuth, Jimmie Durham, David Goldblatt, Leon Golub, David Hammons, Al Hansen, Rebecca Horn, Cameron Jamie, Pierre Klossowski, Jannis Kounellis, Vicken Parsons, Gerhard Rühm, Ann-Sofi Sidén, Juergen Teller

GALERIE ANDREAS HUBER

Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Kaucyila Brooke, Josef Dabernig, Carola Dertnig, Volker Eichelmann, Judith Hopf, Leopold Kessler, Daniel Lergon, Michael Part, Dan Rees, Florian Schmidt

GALERIE ELISABETH & KLAUS THOMAN
Vienna and Innsbruck
Focus: Postwar and contemporary

Artists: Siegfried Anzinger, John Armleder, Erwin Bohatsch, Julia Bornefeld, Herbert Brandl, Carmen Brucic, Clegg & Guttmann, Gunter Damisch, Günther Förg, Johanna Freise, Christoph Hinterhuber, Jürgen Klauke, Jannis Kounellis, Hermann Nitsch, Antonio Ortega, Tal R, Paul Thuile, Franz West

GALERIE KRINZINGER
Vienna
Focus: Performance art
Artists: Kader Attia, Gottfried Bechtold, Günter Brus, Chris Burden, Mike Kelley, Erik van Lieshout, Jonathan Meese, Werner Reiterer, Nancy Rubins, Eva Schlegel, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, Mithu Sen, Frank Thiel, Gavin Turk, Martin Walde, Mark Wallinger, Thomas Zipp

GALERIE MARTIN JANDA

Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Benjamin Butler, Adriana Czernin, Svenja Deininger, Milena Dragicevic, Werner Feiersinger, Jan Merta, Roman Ondák, Allen Ruppersberg, Joe Scanlan, Gabriel Sierra, Roman Signer, Mladen Stilinović, Adrien Tirtiaux, Johannes Vogl, Corinne Wasmuht

GALERIE NACHST ST. STEPHAN ROSEMARIE SCHWARZWAELDER
Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Michal Budny, Heinrich Dunst, Bernard Frize, Katharina Grosse, Aneta Grzeszykowska, Imi Knoebel, Daniel Knorr, Lee Ufan, Isa Melsheimer, Manfred Pernice, Karin Sander, Adrian Schiess, Jessica Stockholder, Christoph Weber

GEORG KARGL
Vienna
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Richard Artschwager, Carol Bove, Martin Dammann, Mark Dion, Agnes Fuchs, Bernhard Leitner, Thomas Locher, David Maljkovic, Jan Mancuska, Matt Mullican, Raymond Pettibon, Markus Schinwald, Rudolf Stingel, Rosemarie Trockel, John Waters, Cerith Wyn Evans, Richard Zeiss

KNOLL GALERIE
Vienna, Austria; Budapest, Hungary
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: AES+F, Akos Birkás, Blue Noses, Ivica Capan, Tony Cragg, Luca Göbölyös, Paul Horn, Mara Mattuschka, Meldibekov and Oris, Csaba Nemes, Natalia Nikitin, Jan van der Pol, Wilhelm Scherübl, Patrick Schmierer

BELGIUM

XAVIER HUFKENS
Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: David Altmejd, Daniel Buren, Thierry De Cordier, Michel François, Antony Gormley

In 1987 Xavier Hufkens set up shop in an unrenovated warehouse in the South Station neighborhood of Brussels. Since then, his gallery has grown in size and stature, moving to a 19th-century town house on Rue Saint-Georges in 1992 and adding a second space on the same street earlier this year. The gallery has 
a well-groomed stable of established Belgian and international artists. Thierry De Cordier made a rare appearance in 2011 for an exhibition of nine paintings, and this year, six of his paintings will
 be shown with a Richard Serra sculpture at the Massimiliano Gioni–curated Central Pavilion at the Venice Biennale.

ZENO X GALLERY
Antwerp
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Michaël Borremans, Raoul De Keyser, Marlene Dumas, Mark Manders & Jack Whitten, Luc Tuymans

Frank and Elaine Demaegd started Zeno X in Antwerp South in 1981 with a roster of contemporary artists whose careers the gallery has continued to foster, including Luc Tuymans, Michaël Borremans, Mark Manders, Marlene Dumas, Patrick Van Caeckenbergh, and Anne-Mie Van Kerckhoven. More recently, the gallery has added young German artist Grace Schwindt to its rolls. A satellite space, Zeno X Storage, opened its doors in the Borgerhout district in 2002; this year, the directors expanded that space in a renovation by Belgian architects Coussée & Goris, making it their primary location.

ELAINE LEVY PROJECT
Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Steven Baelen, Elena Damiani, Rainer Ganahl, goldiechiari, Bernard Guerbadot, Patrick Guns, Irwin, Jean-­Xavier Renaud, Eleonore Saintagnan, Bret Slater, Francisco Valdes, Philippe van Wolputte

GALERIE ALBERT BARONIAN
Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Thomas Bogaert, David Brognon
 & Stéphanie Rollin, Marie José Burki, Robert Crumb, Robert Devriendt, Gilbert & George, Olaf Holzapfel, Fiona Mackay, Florian Maier­-Aichen, Benoit Platéus, Eric Poitevin, Ry Rocklen, Yvan Salomone, Charles Sandison, Bruno Serralongue, Helmut Stallaerts, Achraf Touloub, Stanley Whitney, Gilberto Zorio

GALERIE CATHERINE BASTIDE

Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Jacques André, David Colosi, Sarah Crowner, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Jean-Pascal Flavien, Geert Goiris, Tom Holmes, T. Kelly Mason, Marianne Mueller, William Pope. L, Ola Rindal, Josh Smith, Valerie Snobeck, Catherine Sullivan, Janaina Tschäpe, Kelley Walker

GALERIE RODOLPHE JANSSEN

Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: David 
Adamo, Davide Balula, Marcel Berlanger, Walead Beshty, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Lynne Cohen, Tim Davis, Jürgen Drescher, Kendell Geers, Sean Landers, Chris Martin, Adam McEwen, Sam Moyer, Mrzyk & Moriceau, Sam Samore, Stephen Shore, Betty Tompkins, Banks Violette

GUY PIETERS GALLERY
Knokke-Heist and Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium; Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France
Focus: Modern and contemporary
Artists: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Broodthaers, Alexander Calder, Cesar, John Chamberlain, Edgar Degas, Wim Delvoye, Jim Dine, Jan Fabre, Gilbert & George, Robert Indiana, Bruce Nauman, Nam June Paik, Frank Stella, Jeff Wall, Tom Wesselmann

JAN MOT
Brussels, Belgium; Mexico City, Mexico
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Sven Augustijnen, Pierre Bismuth, Manon de Boer, Rineke Dijkstra, Mario Garcia Torres, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Douglas Gordon, Joachim Koester, David Lamelas, Sharon Lockhart, Tino Sehgal, Philippe Thomas, Tris Vonna-Michell, Ian Wilson

MEESSEN DE CLERCQ
Brussels
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ignasi Aballi, Jorge Méndez Blake, Jordi Colomer, Hreinn Fridfinnsson, Claudio Parmiggiani, Bruno Perramant, Evariste Richer, Fabrice Samyn, José María Sicilia, Thu Van Tran, Leon Vranken

OFFICE BAROQUE GALLERY

Antwerp
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Michel Auder, Aaron Bobrow, Matthew Brannon, Neil Campbell, Mathew Cerletty, David Diao, Tamar Halpern, Owen Land, Leigh Ledare, Kirsten Pieroth, Davis Rhodes, Margaret Salmon, Daniel Sinsel, B. Wurtz

TIM VAN 
LAERE GALLERY
Antwerp
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Atelier Van Lieshout, Victoria Civera, Ellen de Meutter, Armen Eloyan, Gelitin, Adrian Ghenie, Kati Heck, Adam Janes, Tomasz Kowalski, Edward Lipski, Faris McReynolds, Jonathan Meese, Paula Mueller, Nicolas Provost, Peter Rogiers, Serse, Ed Templeton, Juan Usle, Rinus van de Velde, Aaron van Erp, Patrick Vanden Eynde, Benjamin Verdonck, Franz West

VEDOVI GALLERY
Brussels, Belgium; Paris, France
Focus: Modern and contemporary

Artists: Josef Albers, Carl Andre, John Baldessari, Alexander Calder, Enrico Castellani, Maurizio Cattelan, Jean Dubuffet, Lucio Fontana, Keith Haring, Yves Klein, Steve Parrino, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Mark Rothko, Ed Ruscha, Pierre Soulages, Rudolf Stingel, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool

CZECH REPUBLIC

HUNT KASTNER
Prague
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Zbyněk Baladrán, Josef Bolf, Viktor Kopasz, Eva Kotátková, Alena Kotzmannová, Dominik Lang, Daniel Pitín, Jan Serych, Jirí Skála, Michaela Thelenová, Jirí Thyn, Tomás Vanek

JIRI SVESTKA GALLERY
Prague, Czech Republic; Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Stefan à Wengen, Siah Armajani, Adela Babanova, Rafal Bujnowski, Tony Cragg, Andrej Dubravsky, Petra Feriancova, Dan Graham, Jan Kotik, Maki Na Kamura, Marketa Othova, Miroslav Tichy, Katerina Vincourova, Jan Vytiska

DENMARK

DAVID RISLEY GALLERY
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: James Aldridge, Anna Bjerger, Dexter Dalwood, Graham Dolphin, Helen Frik, James Hyde, Thomas Hylander, Henry Krokatsis, Robert McNally, Charlie Roberts, Michael Simpson, Charlie Woolley

GALLERI BO BJERGGAARD
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Anna Barriball, Georg Baselitz, Peter Linde Busk, A K Dolven, Helmut Federle, Federico Herrero, Per Bak Jensen, Per Kirkeby, John Kørner, Jannis Kounellis, Jonathan Meese, Sigmar Polke, Tal R, Daniel Richter, Eva Schlegel, Erik Steffensen, Eve Sussman, Erwin Wurm

GALLERI SUSANNE OTTESEN
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Martin Erik Andersen, Stig Brøgger, Morten Buch, Richard Deacon, Andreas Eriksson, Olav Christopher Jenssen, Ian McKeever, Per Mølgaard, Kehnet Nielsen, Jesper Rasmussen, Marie Søndergaard Lolk, Marijke van Warmerdam, Lawrence Weiner, Emil Westman Hertz, Troels Wörsel

IMO PROJECTS
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Maiken Bent, Jan S. Hansen, A Kassen, Torben Ribe

MARTIN ASBÆK GALLERY
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Tjorg Douglas Beer, Niels Bonde, Elina Brotherus, Jesper Carlsen, Catherine Raben Davidsen, Sabine Dehnel, Berta Fischer, Nicolai Howalt, Carl-Henning Pedersen, Robert Jacobsen, Astrid Kruse Jensen, Søren Martinsen, Hans Hamid Rasmussen, Matt Saunders, Ebbe Stub Wittrup, Clare Woods

V1 GALLERY
Copenhagen
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Katherine Bernhardt, Thomas Campbell, Troels Carlsen, Asger Carlsen, Richard Colman, John Copeland, Shepard Fairey, Hesselholdt & Mejlvang, Jacob Holdt, Peter Funch, Carl Krull, Anika Lori, Wes Lang, Ari Marcopoulos, Geoff McFetridge, Julie Nord, Stephen Powers, Andrew Schoultz, Søren Solkær Starbird

FINLAND

GALERIE FORSBLOM
Helsinki
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mark Francis, Ryan McGinness, Tony Oursler, Julian Schnabel, Donald Sultan

After opening in 1977, Kaj Forsblom’s gallery quickly made its mark internationally with a monumental survey show of Picasso in 1979. Kaj and his son Frej now run the gallery, and the program has changed to solely contemporary art. Both Finnish and international artists are shown, often simultaneously, thanks to the gallery’s dual Gluckman Mayner–designed exhibition spaces. Highlights from the last year include Jason Martin’s “Folie à deux” and a series of design exhibitions in cooperation with Helsinki’s selection as the 2012 World Design Capital.

GALERIE ANHAVA
Helsinki
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Tor Arne, Pamela Brandt, A K Dolven, Jani Hänninen, Timo Heino, Antti Laitinen, Joseph James, Matti Kujasalo, Marika Mäkelä, Grönlund-Nisunen, Jorma Puranen, Janne Räisänen, Mari Sunna, Anna Tuori, Santeri Tuori

FRANCE

AIR DE PARIS
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Guy de Cointet, Trisha Donnelly, Liam Gillick, Philippe Parreno, Allen Ruppersberg

Florence Bonnefous and Edouard Merino founded Air de Paris in Nice in 1990, but moved the gallery to its namesake city, Paris, just four years later. Their first exhibition, “Les ateliers du paradis,” with Pierre Joseph, Philippe Perrin, and Philippe Parreno, helped launch the careers of a new generation of French artists. Last year the gallery staged a historical exhibition of works on paper by French-born, Los Angeles–based performance artist Guy de Cointet (often called the Duchamp of L.A.) from his 1973 series “Cizeghoh Tur NDJMB.”

ALMINE RECH
Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: James Turrell, Jeff Koons, Joseph Kosuth, Ugo Rondinone, Taryn Simon

In 1997 Almine Rech found a home for her gallery in Paris’s 13th arrondissement, and she has continued to expand ever since. In 2007 she opened a space in Brussels, and this year the original gallery moved to a new address in the Marais. Specializing in conceptual and minimalist art, the gallery represents different generations of artists. Recent exhibition highlights include a 2011 Richard Prince show and a 2012 Jeff Koons exhibition, both in Brussels.

GALERIE DANIEL TEMPLON
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Anthony Caro, Larry Bell, Jim Dine, Tunga, Julião Sarmento

One of the oldest fixtures on Paris’s contemporary art scene, the gallery was founded on Rue Bonaparte in 1966 by a 21-year-old Daniel Templon. Since then, the operation has moved to Rue Beaubourg and produced more than 400 exhibitions, including shows by seminal artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Dan Flavin, Keith Haring, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly. Impasse Beaubourg, a second venue dedicated to experimental installations opened in 2007, proving the gallery’s commitment to emerging talents like Japanese installation artist Chiharu Shiota, in addition to established figures like Valerio Adami and Jim Dine.

KAMEL MENNOUR
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Daniel Buren, Huang
 Yong Ping, Alfredo Jaar, Anish Kapoor, Gina Pane

Since opening in 1999 on Rue Mazarine in Paris, Kamel Mennour’s eponymous venture has represented a lineup of artists spanning both the historic, such as Yona Friedman and François Morellet, and the up-and-coming, like Camille Henrot and Latifa Echakhch, and has mounted notable historical surveys, including “Photo-souvenir,” a 2010 exhibition of works by Daniel Buren and Alberto Giacometti made between 1964 and 1966. The gallery has also drawn big international names to Paris for shows like Anish Kapoor’s “Almost Nothing,” in 2011, and Huang Yong Ping’s “Bucharach,” in 2012.

XIPPAS
Paris, France; Athens, Greece; Geneva, Switzerland; Montevideo and Punta Del Este, Uruguay
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Farah Atassi, Celeste Boursier-Mougenot, Vik Muniz, Philippe Ramette, Takis

Greek national Renos Xippas, nephew of gallerist Alexander Iolas, opened a place of his own in 1990 in Paris’s Marais district with an exhibition of works by Greek sculptor and kinetic artist Takis. Since then, his gallery has only grown. In addition to its locations in Greece, Switzerland, and Uruguay, the gallery occupies an 800-square-meter space in Paris (one of the city’s largest) and in 2005 opened La Réserve—an even bigger experimental space in the Parisian suburb of Pacy-sur-Eure—with an inaugural exhibition of works by Vik Muniz, who is solely represented by Xippas in Europe.

ART: CONCEPT
Paris, France
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Martine Abbaléa, Jeremy Deller, Geert Goiris, Phillipe Perrot, Alexandre Singh

BALICE HERTLING
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Neil Beloufa, Kerstin Brätsch, Isabelle Cornaro, Mary Beth Edelson, Luca Frei, Nikolas Gambaroff, Alexander May, Charles Mayton, Greg Parma Smith, Reto Pulfer, Samuel Richardot, Oscar Tuazon, Stephen Willats

CHEZ VALENTIN
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Pierre Ardouvin, Cécile Bart, Eric Baudart, Etienne Bossut, David Douard, Luca Francesconi, Babak Ghazi, Dominique Ghesquière, Aloïs Godinat, Laurent Grasso, George Henry Longly, Andrew Mania, Nicolas Moulin, Anne Neukamp, David Renggli, Joe Scanlan, Veit Stratmann, Niels Trannois, Donelle Woolford

GALERIE AGNES MONPLAISIR
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Hermann Albert, Olga de Amaral, Girolamo Ciulla, Daniel Hourdé, Do König Vassilakis, Igor Mitoraj, Candida Romero, Todd & Fitch, Manuela Zervudachi

GALERIE CHANTAL CROUSEL

Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Tarek Atoui, Claire Fontaine, Fabrice Gygi, Mona Hatoum, Jean-Luc Moulène, Melik Ohanian, Gabriel Orozco, Anri Sala, Alain Séchas, Sean Snyder, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Wang Bing, Heimo Zobernig

GALERIE FRANK ELBAZ
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Davide Balula, Jesus Alberto Benitez, Wallace Berman, Julije Knifer, Justine Kurland, Rainier Lericolais, Mangelos, Ari Marcopoulos, Kaz Oshiro, Gyan Panchal, Bernard Piffaretti, Meredyth Sparks, Blair Thurman, Josip Vaništa

GALERIE JOCELYN WOLFF

Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: William Anastasi, Zbyněk Baladrán, Katinka Bock, Miriam Cahn, Valérie Favre, Gregory Forstner, Prinz Gholam, Guillaume Leblon, Isa Melsheimer, Ulrich Polster, Hans Schabus, Francisco Tropa, Clemens von Wedemeyer, Franz Erhard Walther, Christoph Weber

GALERIE LAURENT GODIN

Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Scoli Acosta, Vincent Beaurin, Peter Buggenhout, Hsia-Fei Chang, Claude Closky, Liz Cohen, Delphine Coindet, Philippe Durand, Sven ’t Jolle, David Kramer, Gonzalo Lebrija, Marilyn Minter, Aleksandra Mir, Vincent Olinet, Mika Rottenberg

GALERIE MICHEL REIN
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Saâdane
 Afif, Maria Thereza Alves, Maja Bajevic, Jean-Pierre Bertrand, Jordi Colomer, Jimmie Durham, Didier Faustino, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Dora Garcia, Mathew Hale, Christian Hidaka, Jean-Charles Hue, Armand Jalut, Yuri Leiderman, Didier Marcel, Stefan Nikolaev, ORLAN

GALERIE NATHALIE OBADIA

Paris, France; Brussels, Belgium
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mequitta Ahuja, Huma Bhabha, Rina Banerjee, Martin Barré, Carole Benzaken, Guillaume Bresson, Patrick Faigenbaum, Roland Flexner, Rokni Haerizadeh, Shirley Jaffe, Youssef Nabil, Frank Nitsche, Manuel Ocampo, Albert Oehlen, Chloe Piene, Pascal Pinaud, Agnès Varda, Joana Vasconcelos

GALERIE NELSON-FREEMAN

Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: David Adamo, Silvia Bächli, Joseph Bartscherer, Marie José Burki, Pedro Cabrita Reis, Ernst Caramelle, Mel Bochner, Jan Dibbets, Robert Filliou (Estate), Josephine Halvorson, Alex Hay, Ken Lum, Matt Mullican, Eric Poitevin, Charlotte Posenenske (Estate), Fred Sandback (Estate), Anne-Marie Schneider, Thomas Schütte, Lucy Skaer

GALERIE PERROTIN
Paris, France; Hong Kong, China; New York, U.S.
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Sophie Calle, Maurizio Cattelan, JR, Takashi Murakami, Jean-Michel Othoniel

GALERIE POLARIS
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Philip Akkerman, Eric Aupol, Bart Baele, Yto Barrada, Mari Bastashevski, Monika Brandmeier, Matthias Bruggmann, Antonio Caballero, John Casey, Stéphane Couturier, Gerardo Custance, Odile Decq, Simon Faithfull, Speedy Graphito, Patrick Guns, Louis Heilbronn

GB AGENCY
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mac Adams, Robert Breer, Elina Brotherus, Omer Fast, Ryan Gander, Mark Geffriaud, Július Koller, Jirí Kovanda, Deimantas Narkevicius, Roman Ondák, Dominique Petitgand, Pratchaya Phinthong, Pia Rönicke, Yann Sérandour

GEORGES-PHILIPPE & NATHALIE VALLOIS
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Boris Achour, Pilar Albarracín, Gilles Barbier, Julien Berthier, Julien Bismuth, Mike Bouchet, Alain Bublex, Massimo Furlan, Taro Izumi, Richard Jackson, Adam Janes, Jean-Yves Jouannais, Martin Kersels, Paul Kos, Paul McCarthy, Joachim Mogarra, Arnold Odermatt, Henrique Oliveira

IN SITU/FABIENNE LECLERC

Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Renaud Auguste-Dormeuil, Andrea Blum, Lynne Cohen, Patrick Corillon, Martin Dammann, Damien Deroubaix, Mark Dion, Meschac Gaba, Subodh Gupta, Gary Hill, Noritoshi Hirakawa, Joreige & Hadjithomas, Florence Paradeis, Bruno Perramant, Laurent Tixador, Patrick Tosani

JGM. GALERIE
Paris
Focus: Contemporary and design

Artists: Mohamed El Baz, Jean-François Fourtou, Zaha Hadid, Edi Hila, Donald Judd, Peter Kogler, Claude Lalanne, Francois-Xavier Lalanne, Marta Pan, Anne & Patrick Poirier, Ricardo Rendon, Laurie Simmons, Keith Sonnier, Fred Wilson, Rob Wynne, Li Yongbin

JOUSSE ENTREPRISE
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Atelier Van Lieshout, Louidgi Beltrame, Frank Breuer, Florence Doléac, Clarisse Hahn, Richard Kern, Martin Le Chevalier, Philippe Meste, Ariane Michel, Matthew Darbyshire, Perfect House, Julien Prévieux, Julia Rometti & Victor Costales, Kishin Shinoyama, SUPERFLEX

LOEVENBRUCK
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Cristian Andersen, Virginie Barré, Alain Declercq, Robert Devriendt, Dewar & Gicquel, Blaise Drummond, Jean Dupuy, Gaillard & Claude, F. Giraud & R. Siboni, Arnaud Labelle-Rojoux, Lang/Baumann, Edouard Levé, Philippe Mayaux, Gabor Osz, Bruno Peinado, Werner Reiterer, Alina Szapocznikow, Morgane Tschiember

MFC-MICHELE DIDIER
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Dennis Adams, Robert Barry, Stanley Brouwn, Peter Downsbrough, Liam Gillick, Pierre Huyghe, Leigh Ledare, Christian Marclay, Allan McCollum, Robert Morris, Jonathan Monk, Antonio Muntadas, Philippe Parreno, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Allen Ruppersberg, Jim Shaw

POLKA GALERIE
Paris
Focus: Postwar photography

Artists: Yves Marchand & Romain Meffre, Stefano De Luigi, Elliott Erwitt, Joakim Eskildsen, Stanley Greene, Alexander Gronsky, Philippe Guionie, Françoise Huguier, William Klein, Ethan Levitas, Daido Moriyama, Jean-Marie Périer, Marc Riboud, Sebastião Salgado, Toshio Shibata

PRAZ-DELAVALLADE
Paris
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Edgar Arceneaux, Amy Bessone, Philippe Decrauzat, Sam Durant, Thomas Fougeirol, Gabriel Hartley, Julian Hoeber, Jim Isermann, Joel Kyack, Nathan Mabry, John Miller, Adi Nes, Robyn O’Neil, Amy O’Neill, Mai-Thu Perret, Dario Robleto, Ry Rocklen, Antoine Roegiers, Brett Cody Rogers, Analia Saban, Erik Schmidt, Jim Shaw, Marnie Weber, Johannes Wohnseifer

THADDAEUS ROPAC GALLERY
Paris, France; Salzburg, Austria
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Cory Arcangel, Joseph Beuys, Lee Bul, Anselm Kiefer, Lawrence Weiner

TORNABUONI ART GALLERY

Paris
Focus: Modern and contemporary

Artists: Valerio Adami, Karel Appel, Arman, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Vanessa Beecroft, Alighiero e Boetti, Fernando Botero, Georges Braque, Alberto Burri, Maurizio Cattelan, Christo, Tony Cragg, Giorgio de Chirico, Gino De Dominicis, Jean Dubuffet, Jean Fautrier, Lucio Fontana, Keith Haring, Hans Hartung, Wassily Kandinsky, Jiri Kolar, Jannis Kounellis

YVON LAMBERT
Paris, France
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Robert Barry, Jenny Holzer, Joan Jonas, Barbara Kruger, Louise Lawler

GERMANY

CONTEMPORARY FINE ARTS
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Georg Baselitz, Cecily Brown, Jonathan Meese, Tal R, Gert & Uwe Tobias

Founded in 1992 in Charlottenburg by Bruno Brunnet, Nicole Hackert, and Philipp Haverkampf, CFA moved to Mitte in ’96 and finally to a David Chipperfield–designed space where it now resides across from Museum Island in Berlin. The gallery fields some of Berlin’s most ambitious exhibitions, such as Gert & Uwe Tobias’s recent show, curated for Dresden’s Kupferstichkabinett and later brought to the Berlin gallery space. The past year also saw the Bruce High Quality Foundation join the gallery’s stable.

ESTHER SCHIPPER
Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Thomas Demand, Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno, Ugo Rondinone, Tomás Saraceno

GALERIE BUCHHOLZ
Cologne and Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Cosima von Bonin, Isa Genzken, Cerith Wyn Evans, Wolfgang Tillmans, Danh Vo

Despite its two locations in Cologne and a Berlin outpost opened on Fasanenstrasse in 2008, understatement is an overriding doctrine for co-owners Daniel Buchholz and Christopher Müller. Hallmark exhibitions such as Isa Genzken’s 10th show, “Early Works,” marking 25 years of collaboration this past winter, and Danh Vo’s collaboration with Julie Ault and Heinz Peter Knes in homage to Martin Wong, have ensured that in both cities Buchholz will be a name to reckon with for years to come.

NEUGERRIEMSCHNEIDER
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ai Weiwei, Pawel Althamer, Olafur Eliasson, Isa Genzken, Elizabeth Peyton

Consistently at the forefront of Berlin’s contemporary art scene, founders Tim Neuger and Burkhard Riemschneider possess
a focus that never wavers from the artists themselves. Many now-ubiquitous names such as Franz Ackermann, Tobias Rehberger, Rirkrit Tiravanija, and Sharon Lockhart practically grew up alongside the gallery, which opened in 1994 with a show of Jorge Pardo. Still without a website and housed in a relatively small space, much of the gallery’s attention is
on institutional exhibitions these days. Things in Berlin haven’t suffered in the process however, with high points from the past year like Isa Genzken and Billy Childish’s double bill during Gallery Weekend and Olafur Eliasson’s “Volcanoes and Shelters” last fall.

ALEXANDER OCHS GALLERIES

Berlin, Germany; Beijing, China
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Per Adolfsen, Chen Guangwu, Heri Dono, Sven Drühl, Gregor Gaida, Ik-Joong Kang, Anna Kott, David Link, Lu Hao, Lu Song, Miao Xiaochun, Heribert C. Ottersbach, Chiharu Shiota, Luzia Simons, Micha Ullman, Wang Shugang, Michael Wesely, Yang Shaobin, Yin Xiuzhen, Zhang Hui, Zhao Zhao

ANDREAS GRIMM
Munich
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Katarina Burin, Damien Cadio, Andreas Chwatal, Nana Dix, Jeff Grant, Leonhard Hurzlmeier, Paul Kennedy, Bjørn Melhus, Peter Riss, Stefan Sandner, Matt Saunders, Felix Schramm, Katharina Sieverding, Lisa Tan, Cornelius Völker, Björn Wallbaum

AUREL SCHEIBLER
Berlin
Focus: Postwar and contemporary

Artists: Wolfgang Betke, Tom Chamberlain, Neil Gall, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Alice Neel, Thomas Rentmeister, Curt Stenvert, David Schutter, Gavin Turk, Alessandro Twombly, Christoph Wedding, Erwin Wurm

BQ
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Dirk Bell, Alexandra Bircken, Carina Brandes, Matti Braun, Owen Gump, Andrew Kerr, KRIWET, Friedrich Kunath, Bojan Sarcević, David Shrigley, Marcus Steinweg, Reinhard Voigt, Richard Wright

BUCHMANN GALERIE
Berlin, Germany; Lugano, Switzerland
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Anna & Bernhard Blume, Daniel Buren, Jim Butler, Lawrence Carroll, John Chamberlain, Tony Cragg, Sean Dawson, Zaha Hadid, Dennis Hollingsworth, Raffi Kalenderian, Wolfgang Laib, Tatsuo Miyajima, Arnold Odermatt, Bettina Pousttchi, Sergio Pergo, Fiona Rae, William Tucker, Lawrence Weiner, Clare Woods

CAPITAIN PETZEL
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Karla Black, Troy Brauntuch, Wade Guyton, Uwe Henneken, Diango Hernandez, Maria Lassnig, Robert Longo, Sarah Morris, Joyce Pensato, Peter Piller, Stephen Prina, Blake Rayne, Amy Sillman, Christiana Soulou, John Stezaker, Kelley Walker

CARLIER | GEBAUER
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ernesto Caivano, Michel François, Paul Graham, Asta Gröting, Tomasz Kowalski, Julie Mehretu, Kirsi Mikkola, Sebastian Diaz Morales, Jean­Luc Moulène, Andreas Mühe, Paul Pfeiffer, Erik Schmidt, Thomas Schütte, Mark Wallinger, Emily Wardill

DANIEL BLAU
Munich, Germany; London, U.K.
Focus: Postwar
Artists: Georg Baselitz, Chuck Close, Roger Fenton, Lucian Freud, Gustave Le Gray, Anselm Kiefer, Per Kirkeby, Eugene Leroy, Markus Lüpertz, Matt Mullican, Charles Nègre, Georges Poulet, Marc Quinn, Andy Warhol

GALERIE BARBARA THUMM

Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Jo Baer, Fiona Banner, Fernando Bryce, Teresa Burga, Jota Castro, Martin Dammann, Diango Hernández, Valérie Favre, Christian Hoischen, Anna K.E., Johnny Miller, Mariele Neudecker, Anna Oppermann, Chloe Piene

GALERIE BARBARA WEISS

Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Thomas Bayrle, Geta Bratescu, Janet Cardiff & George Bures Miller, Maria Eichhorn, Nicole Eisenman, Harun Farocki, Berta Fischer, Laura Horelli, Jonathan Horowitz, Boris Mikhailov, John Miller, Rebecca Morris, Collier Schorr, Andreas Siekmann, Suse Weber

GALERIE CRONE
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Norbert Bisky, Marc Bronner, Hanne Darboven, Monika Grzymala, Harald Hermann, Bernd Koberling, Daniel Megerle, Peter Miller, Adrien Missika, Marcel Odenbach, Jerszy Seymour, Rosemarie Trockel

GALERIE EIGEN + ART
Berlin and Leipzig, Germany
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Martin Eder, Carsten Nicolai, Neo Rauch, David Schnell, Matthias Weischer

GALERIE GISELA CAPITAIN
Cologne
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Karla Black, Günther Förg, Anna Gaskell, Wade Guyton, Uwe Henneken, Marcel Odenbach, Albert Oehlen, Jorge Pardo, Seth Price, Monika Sosnowska, Franz West, Johannes Wohnseifer, Christopher Wool

GALERIE GUIDO W. BAUDACH

Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: André Butzer, Björn Dahlem, Thilo Heinzmann, Thomas Helbig, Andy Hope 1930, Rashid Johnson, Jürgen Klauke, Erwin Kneihsl, Erik van Lieshout, Bjarne Melgaard, Aïda Ruilova, Markus Selg

GALERIE KAMM
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Kate Davis, Amy Granat, Charlie Hammond, Lorna Macintyre, Michele di Menna, Simon Dybbroe Møller, Pavel Pepperstein, Bernd Ribbeck, Albrecht Schäfer

GALERIE KARSTEN GREVE
Cologne, Germany; Paris, France; St. Moritz, Switzerland
Focus: Postwar and Contemporary
Artists: Louise Bourgeois, John Chamberlain, Willem de Kooning, Jannis Kounellis, Cy Twombly

GALERIE MAX HETZLER
Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mona Hatoum, Jeff Koons, Beatriz Milhazes, Albert Oehlen, Christopher Wool

GALERIE NEU
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Kai Althoff, Cosima von Bonin, Bernadette Corporation, Cerith Wyn Evans, Claire Fontaine, Florian Hecker, Karl Holmqvist, Sergej Jensen, Kitty Kraus, Klara Liden, Birgit Megerle, Manfred Pernice, Gedi Sibony, Andreas Slominski, Francesco Vezzoli

GALERIE THOMAS
Munich
Focus: Modern and German Expressionism
Artists: Josef Albers, Ernst Barlach, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Eduardo Chillida, Wim Delvoye, Jim Dine, Otto Dix, Lyonel Feininger, Anselm Kiefer, Paul Klee, Georg Kolbe, August Macke, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Pablo Picasso, Otto Piene, Gerhard Richter, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Egon Schiele, Richard Tuttle

GALERIE THOMAS SCHULTE
Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Alice Aycock, Richard Deacon, Alfredo Jaar, Stephen Willats, Robert Wilson

JABLONKA GALERIE
Cologne
Focus: Postwar and contemporary

Artists: Nobuyoshi Araki, Miquel Barceló, Francesco Clemente, Will Cotton, Eric Fischl, Alex Katz, Mike Kelley, David LaChapelle, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Andreas Slominski, Philip Taaffe, Andy Warhol, Terry Winters

JOHANN KOENIG
Berlin, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Tue Greenfort, Katharina Grosse, Jeppe Hein, Michael Sailstorfer, Corinne Wasmuht

JOHNEN GALERIE
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Stephan Balkenhol, Roger Ballen, Stefan Bertalan, Martin Boyce, Martin Creed, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Ryan Gander, Francesco Gennari, Dan Graham, Rodney Graham, Martin Honert, Roman Ondák, Thomas Ruff, Anri Sala, Wilhelm Sasnal, Tino Sehgal, Jeff Wall

KLOSTERFELDE
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Matthew Antezzo, John Bock, Hanne Darboven, Lara Favaretto, Ulrike Heise, Christian Jankowski, Edward Krasinski, Ulrike Kuschel, Armin Linke, Matt Mullican, Lisa Oppenheim, Dan Peterman, Steven Pippin, Michael Snow, Vibeke Tandberg, Jorinde Voigt

KONRAD FISCHER GALERIE

Dusseldorf and Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Carl Andre, Bernd & Hilla Becher, Daniel Buren, Nina Canell, Tony Cragg, Gilbert & George, On Kawara, Wolfgang Laib, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Bruce Nauman, Charlotte Posenenske, Thomas Ruff, Gregor Schneider

KEWENIG GALERIE
Berlin, Germany; Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Bert de Beul, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, Marcel Broodthaers, Astrid Colomar, Elger Esser, Seydou Keïta, Jannis Kounellis, Hendrik Krawen, Bertrand Lavier, Pavel Pepperstein, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, Marcelo Viquez, Peter Wüthrich, Ralf Ziervogel

MD72
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Karl Holmqvist, David Adamo, Florian Hecker, Marc Camille Chaimowicz, Nick Mauss, Tom Burr, Danh Vo, Heinz Peter Knes, Manfred Pernice, Jana Euler, Michael Callies, Sergej Jensen

MICHAEL WERNER GALLERY
Trebbin and Cologne, Germany; New York, U.S.; London, U.K.
Focus: Postwar and contemporary

Artists: Georg Baselitz, Marcel Broodthaers, Peter Doig, Jörg Immendorff, Per Kirkeby, Ernst Wilhelm Nay

PERES PROJECTS
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Assume Vivid Astro Focus, Dan Attoe, Joe Bradley, Jeff Elrod, Mark Flood, Leo Gabin, Dorothy Iannone, Alex Israel, Antonio Ballester Moreno, Kirstine Roepstorff, David Ostowski, Dash Snow, Dean Sameshima, Marinella Senatore, Mark Titchner

SIES + HÖKE
Düsseldorf
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Abel Auer, Uta Barth, Gianni Caravaggio, Etienne Chambaud, Daniel Gustav Cramer, Björn Dahlem, Hansjoerg Dobliar, Marcel Dzama, Federico Herrero, Kris Martin, Jonathan Meese, Damien Roach, Neal Tait, Markus Vater, Sam Windett

TANYA LEIGHTON GALLERY

Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ayreen Anastas & Rene Galbri, Pavel Büchler, Alejandro Cesarco, David Diao, Aleksandra Domanović, Sean Edwards, Aurélien Gamboni, Sharon Hayes, Sanya Kantarovsky, David Levine, Enzo Mari, Bruce McLean, Lucas Ospina, Dan Rees, John Smith

WIEN LUKATSCH
Berlin
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Nina Canell, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Mariana Castillo Deball, Jimmie Durham, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Robert Filliou, Luca Frei, Arthur Köpcke, Dave McKenzie, Elisabeth Neudörfl, Peter Piller, Thomas Ravens, Dieter Roth, Tomas Schmit, Ingrid Wiener, Haegue Yang

The feel of “Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney,” an exhibition curated from the Morgan Library’s archive, is so sober that you almost forget that Barney’s most famous work, the five-part Cremaster cycle, 1994–2002, is a film that mythologizes the development of the muscle at the base of the penis that raises or drops a man’s testicles to regulate their temperature. Indeed, the exhibition, divided into two galleries, looks more like a biographical show of the personal effects of a deceased artist at a university library than it does a contemporary art exhibition. But it also lends gravitas to an artist whom Peter Schjeldahl, in a 2006 review in the New Yorker, dismissed as a “star for attaining stardom.” The ephemera show that behind the surreal, often provocative imagery—for example, the oft-derided scene in which Barney and his wife, Björk, cut off each other’s legs in Drawing Restraint 9, 2005—there is a learned man who is meticulous about his research.

The larger space includes a plethora of Barney’s drawings in self-lubricating plastic frames and 12 glass cases full of ephemera. The cases are cabinets of curiosities that show the research materials used to construct the narratives of seven
 of Barney’s films, including Cremaster Cycle 3 and the
yet to be released River of Fundament, 2008–13. The forthcoming seven-act opera dramatizes, in the tradition of Egyptian deities, the life
of a Chrysler Crown Imperial as it dies and is reincarnated into different automobiles. Along with incredible objects culled from the Morgan Library, which include a copy of the more than 2,000-year-old Egyptian Book of the Dead and original drawings by Michelangelo and Francisco de Goya, copies of novels written by Norman Mailer and Ernest Hemingway make up Barney’s research material. Images of Houdini appear frequently, as do photographs of football players, sketches of the human body in motion, references to Egyptian mythology, and the artist’s notes jotted down on index cards. Barney is clearly obsessed with America in the Golden Age, when Detroit was the center of the automobile industry, film stars were silent, and skyscrapers like the Chrysler Building were popping up all over New York. To remind you that he’s still Matthew Barney, lewd images—like poop coming out of an anus—are thrown in like little shock bombs.

You’d need a day to really pore over the materials in the cases, but a cursory tour around the perimeter of the room is enough to get to know the drawings. Barney has stated that his work is an inverted pyramid that starts conceptually with drawing and ends with drawings being made from the narrative work. Ironically, though, many of those in the show, including Guardian of the Veil: Thoth, 2007, look like sketches of characters in a fantasy novel drawn by a particularly skilled boy.

To underscore the importance of drawing in his work, Barney left the elements of 
his latest live performance, Drawing Restraint 20, 2013,
in the corner of the second gallery. They include a barbell, bumper plates, a paper marked with ink footprints, and an arc drawn on the wall, underneath which he has written notes about his weight-training regimen. Part of a series he began in the late 1980s, in which he constrains himself with weights in order to make a set of self-imposed resistances while he draws, this latest iteration of the project looks like it was created by a deranged weight lifter once chained to the wall. The absence of Barney’s image in the installation seems significant, especially in light of the fact that in recent years, his presence has diminished in the art world. Perhaps that’s why the exhibition feels like one by a deceased artist rather than one still creating work. Barney has become something of a ghost.

“Subliming Vessel: The Drawings of Matthew Barney” is on view at the Morgan Library & Museum from May 10 through September 8, 2013.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

This review appears in the October 2013 issue of Modern Painters. 

I came prepared to dislike Gramsci Monument, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Dia Foundation-funded monument-cum-pop-up community center-cum-play structure, sited in the Bronx among the Forest Houses Projects. In the abstract, it seems to evince the same kind of vampiric impulse as the recent Venice Biennial—that is, that contemporary art is so enervated that it needs a blood infusion from non-art communities in order to achieve the semblance of life.

But the truism that you have actually to visit Hirschhorn’s odd participatory installations—this is the fourth in a series of works dedicated to voguish European philosophers (previously, Bataille, Spinoza, and Deleuze)—in order to appreciate them proves true. Such public projects really are of a different order than the famed Swiss artist’s gallery works. In traditional art spaces, his signature rough-and-ready, fucked-up aesthetic reads like big-budget professional art in self-taught art drag. Here, the unevenly planed surfaces and slightly rickety construction come across as an invitation to use.

The tale of the Monument is by now familiar. Hirschhorn visited dozens of housing projects, finally settling on Forest Houses when he met the enthusiastic President of the Resident Association, Erik Farmer, who helped advocate for it. The artist built it with a team of locals. The finished structure houses an art studio where classes are taught, a radio station, a daily newspaper produced by volunteers, a community-run food stand, and a regular program of open mics and lectures by thinkers from Stanley Aronowitz to Gayatri Spivak. There’s an always-bustling computer lab where kids sit, supervised, playing games and sharing YouTube videos.

Compared to these activities, the library of books and artifacts dedicated to the Italian Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci comes across as an incongruous afterthought—though the structure and housing blocks around it are studded with such Gramscian bon mots as “Destruction is difficult; it is as difficult as creation,” spray-painted on white sheets. The philosopher’s presence is important to Hirschhorn’s artistic project of “rethinking the monument,” and it is part of what makes this a pilgrimage site for white art worlders in a way that a straight community center would not be—but Gramsci is essentially just a pretext for what makes Gramsci Monument lovable.

Few thinkers of the 20th century have been as distorted and abused. A revolutionary anti-fascist who died in prison, a victim of Mussolini, Gramsci penned his Prison Notebooks as an attempt to theorize the cultural component of anti-capitalist strategy. Written essentially in code because of censors (“Marxism” is rendered “the philosophy of praxis,” and so on), they were vulnerable to creative misreadings. In the ’80s they became totemic in cultural studies departments, and thereafter this Marxist somehow became a key influence on post-Marxism; a thinker whose project was linking the political struggle for economic justice to culture morphed into a thinker for whom struggle was purely cultural, intellectual, abstract.

With regard to its fundamental themes of art and community uplift, Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument seems by and large to pay homage to this latter soft-focus Gramsci, not the steely Machiavellian of the Notebooks. Without connection to a sustained activist organization with a concrete program and political goals, cultural intervention would have been only an idle concern for the author of “The Modern Prince.” And while the Monument is many wholesome things, it will not be sustained.

That’s no reason to dismiss the whole thing. When Will Brand and Whitney Kimball did the invaluable work of actually interviewing area residents about what they thought of the project, they found that everyone was at the very least bemused by it. It has offered something for the kids to do and a bit of summer distraction in a community that is starved for resources. That, in my book, is a very cool thing. As for the nagging concern that the Monument turns a down-trodden neighborhood into a kind of novel spectacle for art tourists, well, you can view residents as using Hirschhorn and his art world resources as much as you can view him as using them for his career and credibility.

“A lot of people up there have said they’re gonna cry when it’s down,” Erik Farmer’s mother said, when asked about the meaning of the work. In the end, I’d think of the Gramsci Monument as neither a finished project nor a neat feel-good story. It is and can only be a monument to an absence—to institutions, organizations, and movements that still need to be built.

Thomas Hirschhorn's The Gramsci Monument is at the Forest Houses, off Tinton Avenue between 163 and 165 Streets, through September 15.

It’s nearing six o’clock on a balmy June evening at Raceway Park in Englishtown, New Jersey, and artist Matthew
 Day Jackson’s jet-black dragster is sitting dormant in the parking lot. Engine problems. A cavalcade of big-block Mustangs and Corvettes of every vintage, tuner-tweaked Dodge Neons and Honda hatchbacks, and some barely street-legal motorcycles (many piloted by dads in racing slicks) zip by. Each of their drivers registers the same awestruck stare that is often seen 
on the faces of art patrons when viewing Jackson’s increasingly complex world of off-track sculptures. On September 6 he’ll present a new suite of them as “Something Ancient, Something New, Something Stolen, Something Blue” at his New York gallery, Hauser & Wirth. But that’s just an amuse-bouche for the restless 39-year-old: With his wife, Laura Seymour, he is also starting a film-production company, opening a gallery this month inside his Brooklyn studio, and founding a nonprofit to benefit writers, scientists, and other non–object-creating types, all while raising the couple’s two young sons, Everett and Flynn, in the home they built above the new studio.

“He’s in a very speedy car right now, doing so many amazing things very, very fast,” says Hauser & Wirth partner Marc Payot. “He’s on fire.”

Now, however, Jackson is laser-focused on the car. Capturing this nonstarter of an event for posterity are filmmaker Joseph Hung and sound technician Timothy Bright, both partners, with David Tompkins, in the production company Sleeper Pictures. They also collaborate on the artist’s myth-making In Search Of... videos, which journey into fictionalized accounts of the paranormal via truthy nuclear test–site history, zombie culture, even the artist’s own faked disappearance. This scene may appear in Jackson’s first feature documentary, Speed and the Art of Letting Go, perhaps with footage of the artist’s numerous calls to dragster guru Bob George, seeking mechanical advice.

“You,” says Jackson, motioning me over to the car. “I need you to sit inside here and press your foot on the brake.” Everyone else with the MDJ Racing team, including his friend, fellow artist and pit boss SunTek Chung, is here in a crew capacity. So I wedge myself into the cramped cockpit—basically a coffin strapped to a bomb—as Jackson attempts to start the engine by hand. To the uninitiated, it’s an intense process. One might describe the buildup to a drag race as being like war: long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror—which is, coincidentally, the same phrase sculptor Nick van Woert used to describe his stint working in Jackson’s studio a few years back.

But is this drag-racing obsession art? Or sport? Or something else? His dealer, Marc Payot, opines, “The whole process is
a piece, and the car is a sculpture, but it’s going further than anything I’ve ever seen.” Curator Neville Wakefield, who traveled down to Gainesville, Florida with Jackson to get licensed
 at Frank Hawley’s Drag Racing School, echoes those sentiments. “What’s interesting is that he’s taking this practice that’s 
been part of his family history and kind of folding it into his art. He’s almost taking the activity itself as an art form.” In the 
past Jackson has channeled many disparate streams of his roots, from his mother’s needlepoint in his embroidered Life magazine covers to the frame from a race car his cousin crashed, which
he refitted with a Corvette body and a stained-glass wind-
shield lit from beneath with prismatic colors in the installation Chariot II (I Like America and America Likes Me), 2008.

To borrow a term Jackson is quite fond of, his is a radical expansion of what constitutes artistic practice. While performance artists such as Chris Burden and Marina Abramovic have put themselves in harm’s way for their work, Jackson’s drag race performance—if you can even call it that, and he doesn’t— may be the most insane extension of any purportedly no-limits practice the art world has ever known.

As an exploration of American systems, the racing does fit 
in with what has been a focus of inquiry in much of Jackson’s
 work. “In the clean water that washes over my body when I take a shower, I’m immediately implicated,” Jackson points out. “Why 
is my water cleaner than it is elsewhere? And why is my gas cheaper than it is anywhere else? And why is it that I can buy a pair of Levi’s jeans for $50? In thinking locally and in how I understand myself in relationship to my local surroundings, I’ve also found a way to talk about things that are maybe a bit more universal. But it’s getting more and more complicated to talk about what I’m doing because the boundaries of my practice keep expanding.”

The day before the test out in Englishtown, Jackson—dressed in the same Nantucket red shorts and Rod Laver tennis shoes
 he would wear at the track—receives me at his cavernous new studio in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood. Once home to the popular Studio B nightclub, the live/work building is filled with state-of-the-art metal- and woodworking shops, his uncle’s old two-tone Skip Nichols Victa race car, and a gondola from Colorado’s Keystone Ski Resort. Jackson escorts me around the various shop floors and into the staff-designed, Robinson Crusoe–themed kitchen, which will soon have an animatronic parrot that makes dirty remarks in Swiss-German, a nod to his gallery’s Zurich roots. (“I want 
the voice to be Marc Payot’s,” Jackson says. “I want to try to get him drunk and then have him say some nasty insults.”) Outside the relative calm of the kitchen, a dozen or so assistants—his “secret team of ninjas”—are readying various works for his show in September, which, he says, will include about 20 pieces.

With the exception of a few misfires over the past decade, Jackson has made some of the more fascinating art objects in recent memory; he likens their seemingly divergent themes 
to “different bodies of work, akin to different rooms in a memory palace.” MDJ’s ever-expanding cosmology has teased out singularly peculiar strains within the increasingly schizophrenic American psyche, highlighting our collectively conflicted relationships with death, the paranormal, religion, Fat Man and Little Boy, the Underground Railroad, the failed utopian visions of Buckminster Fuller and Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph Kittinger’s pre-NASA balloon odyssey, the privatization of the space race, military perversions of aerial photography, Robert Oppenheimer, the American West, car culture, escapist mentalities, and the “violent terror cult” that is the United States post-9/11.

He’s tackled these subjects via laser-cut Formica panels depicting uniquely American scenes (from Yosemite Valley to the opening of Disney World); woodcut portraits of Harriet Tubman and Fuller; punk rock T-shirts fashioned as sails for a Viking funeral ship; a fake New York Times article reporting Jackson had gone missing; the hoax-perpetuating videos about ghosts, zombies, and the phantom planet Eidolon (inspired by the Rod Serling– and Leonard Nimoy–hosted In Search of... documentary series); his Study Collection, steel shelving units filled with polyurethane skulls (one scanned from a man who was impaled by a pole), casts of bombs, and sculptures of disarticulated 
body parts; as well as a photographic series of himself as
 a corpse. It’s a journey into the heart of the American Dream, through the eye of a tornado.

That tornado has been spinning with an urgent immediacy in the wake of Jackson’s diagnosis, in 2006,
 of multiple sclerosis. The chronic disease attacks the central nervous system, affecting brain, optic-nerve, and spinal-cord function, while potentially decreasing life span by a decade. When viewed through that lens, his ambitious, shotgun approach to the studio seems more than reasonable.

But this manic desire to do more, be better, work harder— whether in his work, family experiences, drag racing—has been with Jackson since the day he left the hospital in 2006. Following his discharge, he immediately went to the B&H camera store 
in Manhattan, bought a new SLR, and embarked on his cross- country Bummer Tour, sleeping in a van while photographing anthropomorphic rocks across the Lower 48. (He considers
 the resulting “Bummer Tour” photo series one of his best works.) Still, though he remains wildly productive, doing so remains a challenge while living with MS. “The side effects for the medication I take every week are renal failure and suicidal depression,” he says, laughing. “So it’s a fucking blast, let me tell you.”

Jackson’s ability to see humor in the face of death has no doubt accounted for the success of his macabre “Me, Dead at...” photographs. The series began when he became a father at 35 and so far
 has depicted him spread out in a casket, wrapped in a body bag, burned on a funeral pyre, and picked apart by vultures. Jackson plans to make these every year for the rest of his life, perhaps because death is not just an art concept for him. At Hauser & Wirth, he’ll unveil the fifth installment,
 a picture of himself tied up in the crotch of a 
tree. “I’m not really making fun of death, and my acknowledgment is to remind myself not that
I’m going to die but that I’m alive, so now is the only time to do anything,” he says. “That’s why there’s 
a drag-racing car in the backyard, or why we’re starting a gallery, or why we bought this fucking ridiculous building that will basically bankrupt us.”

The willingness to push himself beyond what 
might be—physically, conceptually, financially—
possible has propelled Jackson into the highest reaches of the blue-chip art world. His show 
at Hauser & Wirth will follow extravaganzas by
 Dieter Roth and Paul McCarthy. “Matt’s practice is a life-art experience in the lineage of Roth and McCarthy,” Payot explains. “He builds his studio, he’s got these young artists working for him whom he mentors, he writes, he curates, he does videos, he cooks.”

“I’ve made works in the past where I’m like, ‘Holy shit, what have I gotten myself into here?’ ” Jackson says. “But that’s a sweet drug, and once you get a taste of that, you can’t really give it up.” That rush, he adds, has pushed him to make a number of works for the September show that few would suspect of coming from him. This process began when he encountered a scholar’s stone (more or less a handheld memory palace) on the front lawn of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He snapped a photo with his iPhone and is using that image to craft an 11-by-7-foot replica from 4,000 pounds of man-made lunar dust, which, he explains, is “what they used to see if they could take moon dust and glue it together to make a 3-D form.” The rock will be the first work people will see upon entering the gallery—which is being divided into three smaller spaces and one larger. To Jackson, the piece works as a metaphor for our relationship with the moon circa 2013: the satellite as a meditation device, one we’ve visited but will never really inhabit.

The lunar landscape resurfaces in a homage to The Burghers 
of Calais, Auguste Rodin’s seminal bronze that depicts the six French burghers who offered themselves up as hostages to King Edward III in exchange for freeing their city. Only in Jackson’s 3-D printed version, the burghers are traversing lunar terra marked with imprints from all the manned space missions. From Jackson’s perspective, the burghers’ death march was echoed by the NASA astronauts who returned from space only to suffer survivor’s guilt for their military friends, who were dying in the jungles of Vietnam just as they themselves were being welcomed home as heroes.

Clicking and printing continues apace with Jackson’s computer-rendered version of a Pietà “as a human fossil of broken buildings and broken Coke bottles and bones,” he says. “I wanted it to look like you quarried it from a disaster site.”

“Matt makes sculpture like collage. I’ll fuss over how
two things come together, and he’s more Cro-Magnon about it,” says his friend van Woert. “Most artists like to complicate things for themselves—he just avoids that whole conversation.”

Still, the Cro-Magnon’s efforts have an unavoidably sophisticated aspect. He once made a composite-wood reconstruction of Brancusi’s Bird in Space from memory. He’s reimagined Antoine le Moiturier’s Tomb of Philippe Pot through milled astronauts carrying a mirror-box coffin with 
a skeleton based on his own. He’s even refashioned the cockpit of a B-29 bomber into a swank men’s lounge with a case full of polychromatic skulls and Dymaxion-inspired design motifs. “I’m not interested in making things well,” Jackson insists. “I’m interested in making them all the way.” For him, a successful sculpture is one that “never gives up, that you can keep staring at, and it’s never going to fail.”

Finding unfailing form is easier said than done. But part of that process is playing out in the courtyard, where an assistant is power-washing flaked paint off the latest piece in Jackson’s ongoing “August 6, 1945” series. The wall-mounted sculptural grids—think 8-by-12-foot architectural renderings of cities with Monopoly-size buildings—reference the devastation wrought by the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki that day. Over the past four years, he’s re-created metropolises from D.C. and Tokyo to Baghdad and Dresden, typically from scorched wood and molten lead. They are the only pieces for which he’ll accept a commission, but even then he’s selective and collectors get no input beyond the city.

“I probably would not do Anchorage, Alaska,” he jokes. He hopes to make enough to have a show devoted to the series one day. “They are somehow automatic, and automated, and I like that.” The Paris model, which will hang opposite the Pietà sculpture at Hauser & Wirth, appears even more beautiful, with its “viral” Yves Klein Blue finish. But that’s a subversive seduction. As Jackson explains, Paris was the first city to be aerial-photographed, a technology that was later bastardized by the military to make smarter bombs. Thus, the Seine will run red with rust.

Jackson is also busy with two sculptural series featuring various body parts displayed in mirror boxes and made from rapid prototypes and MRI scans. They will include veins cast in steel that are allowed to rust; muscles made from a mannequin head burned inside cedar bark, cast in silicone, and colored 
like meat; a porcelain skull; gray matter cast in lead; white matter cast in glass; nerves hewn from tree roots cast in copper alloy. For his flesh sculpture, Jackson made a silicone life cast
 of a Michelangelo look-alike, flayed as if like Bartholomew. “Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel largely under protest, and people believe he painted himself as Bartholomew with his flesh flayed on the wall in the Last Judgment,” Jackson says.
“In the event that Michelangelo believed in God, and he painted himself as a martyr, with that expression, he doesn’t have faith in God. Michelangelo’s ultimate faith was in art. I know that’s 
corny to say, but whatever.”

Born in Panorama City, California, and raised in Olympia, Washington, Jackson had no notion of art world stardom in high school, when his biggest dream was to play college football. “I come from a long line of time-card punchers,” he says. “My mom and dad worked in grocery stores, and my grandfather was a cop. There’s a bunch of military people, and 
up until three generations ago, they were pretty much all farmers.”

His father, Jacob, was a defensive end and offensive guard
 at Cal State Northridge, and managed a Fred Meyer store 
in Olympia. His mother, Karen, was a devout Christian Scientist who worked the cash register at Mega Foods. They both made cameos in the In Search of...Eidolon video—reminiscing over photos of their disappeared son—and Karen is now one of the studio employees, working on needlepoint. “I think I understand how I am now by the fact that I was raised around people who were really restless and recognized that there’s no really 
definite answer,” Jackson says. “That life is about questioning.”

The family’s obsession with speed started with Karen’s grandfather, who used to race a Model A with a flathead V-8 around circle tracks in Southern California. It was Karen herself who taught Jackson how to ride a motorcycle as a teenager, on a ’78 Sportster that had GNARLEY DAVIDSON emblazoned on the gas tank.

Aside from football and Jesus—both of which Jackson would later abandon—the only major dictum he remembers hearing from his folks was, “you can do whatever you want, but you really have to make a buck.” Were it not for a teacher inspired by his drawings, Jackson would probably never have attended art school.

“Some people are validated by money, some by fame, but I’m validated by people I look up to,” says Jackson, who earned a degree in printmaking at the University of Washington while working at the Fred Meyer and riding around Seattle on a pair of “terrifyingly fast” motorcycles. (Though those bikes are long gone, he now has two others that probably fall under a similar banner.)

Jackson is currently directing a documentary, Speed and the Art of Letting Go, which will investigate his family’s racing history while also following speed freaks like Antron Brown, the first African-American to win an NHRA championship; flat-track motorcycle legend Mert Lawwill; and a land-speed team looking to break 500 miles per hour. “The movie isn’t about understanding my familial history,” he says, “but rather how my family has basically performed the symptoms of the culture that formed this sort of automobile racing my family participated in.”

Speed will form part of a much larger, multiyear art-and-commerce project called “24 Hours of Television,” which will incorporate the film, the In Search of... videos, and presumably many hours of yet-to-be-shot footage. He’s also working on a drag-bike collaboration with van Woert (a recent speed convert) that they intend to race on the Nevada salt flats. His sustained dialogue with artists like van Woert, Chung, and Rashid Johnson fuels not only the practice but also his family life.

“I want my children to grow up knowing all my artist friends and all the people I meet through my work so they have this understanding that they have the power to do things that are difficult and strange,” says Jackson, who warehouses a selection of his art as a potential trust fund for his boys. That said, he isn’t precious about his work. If it doesn’t last, so be it. “I don’t know if my name will stay, and I don’t care about being a master,” he states. “But through doing what I’m doing, hopefully I can give back a language that’s better than how I found it.”

This might explain the fervor he and Laura are putting into their one-artwork, appointment-only gallery, Bunker259 (at
 259 Banker Street, in Brooklyn), which they’re opening with the help of Italian writer and gallerist Mario Diacono, who’s been staging one-artwork exhibitions for two decades.

“I showed with him in Boston, and it was a really important experience that taught me that the language of art is ancient and has meanings beyond the contemporary,” Jackson explains. “If you asked my grandparents to go to an art museum, they’d be like, ‘I don’t want to go to a museum; that’s where I feel dumb and poor.’ So hospitality is a very important part of the gallery, because I think one of the things that makes art really hard to look at is how it’s shown.” At the gallery, he says, “I’ll meet you with a cup of coffee and some chocolate and maybe a cookie, and the book we’re publishing with the show, and hopefully you’ll leave me $25 and take the beautiful publication with you.” When a patron is occupying the space, nobody else is allowed inside. “It’s yours to enjoy like a treat.”

The inaugural show will feature one of Sandra Allen’s massive anthropomorphic pencil drawings of trees, but there will be no images of the exhibition on the invitations, no images on the website, so if you don’t see it while it’s up, you won’t see it. “The idea is that the only thing that will stop us from doing this is energy, time, spirit, emotion, and money,” says Jackson. “If all of those things collapse, then we’ll stop, but as long as there’s something left, we’ll continue.”

The week after his New Jersey track debut, Jackson returned to Englishtown for another test and tune. Everything was running perfectly; he staged well, but then forgot to turn on the air in the throttle and idled his way down the track. Though the experience was lackluster, the team joked on the ride home that they should change their name to the Banker Street Idlers.

“The thing that’s really good about being an artist is that there are so many times I’ve shown work that I’m almost embarrassed by,” says Jackson. “The fact that I idled down the track was more disappointing than it was embarrassing. I think that in doing that, and knowing that on September 6 I may even show some more work I’m embarrassed by—I’m now over the fear. I know that I’m still going to fuck up, and that’s okay—I know I can go back and do better. I just really want to do it. I wish I could go to the track every day.” Any number of multihyphenate artists might wish something similar for themselves: to inhabit
a space where they’ve finally married enough ambition and bandwidth to be a talented sculptor, gallerist, film director, father (and, perhaps, even drag racer) every day of the week. What sets Jackson apart is that he actually does it—all of it.

This article is published in the September 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images of his work, click on the slideshow. 

Getting to Ethan Greenbaum’s New York studio isn’t exactly a charming experience. You cross the Gowanus and Brooklyn-Queens expressways, a path whose dreariness is rivaled only by the block that follows—a marble supply company, a fabricator of countertops, a metal shop, with its grinding, hammering soundtrack of industry. The artist’s workspace itself is a quiet reprieve, the walls filled with what appear to be large, luminous photographs. The works are excruciatingly vivid in their detail
 of ordinary cement and stone surfaces.
 But this isn’t standard photography: Greenbaum’s images are printed onto 
clear acrylic, like so much commercial signage in the city—which often serves
 as inspiration. For instance, the faux- granite siding of that nearby marble supply company, visible from Greenbaum’s studio window, has made its way into
 Back Slash, 2012. The artist photographed the artificial surface using a meticulous 1:1 tiling process so that he can catch every nuance of the material. He has then digitally removed the grout between each rock and printed the resulting image on a 90¾-by-100-inch acrylic sheet; on the material’s back side, he has printed an expanse of red, white, and black faux-marble Formica. (Greenbaum occasionally incorporates found digital images, as in Veneerist, 2012, which turns a swatch of material on Formica’s website into a pattern resembling colored mold.) The overall effect is beautifully disorienting, casting the banality of ready-made materials in a new light.

“I never set out to be a photographer
or a sculptor per se,” Greenbaum says. “I had to teach myself those methods in order to create the works that I had in mind.” Though he originally trained as a painter, his practice is now fairly hands-off.

“Photographing on the street is the most tactile I get,” he says with a laugh, noting that much of his time is spent working with digital images on the computer or collaborating with commercial printers and set shops. He’s most concerned with investigating the mediated image and how viewing things via a computer screen or in print has changed the way we experience the physical world. “There’s something about the totality of an image in a book that is very satisfying,” he says. “The scale is uniform, the surface is uniform. You could say that my work is an attempt to bring the pleasure derived from viewing screen or print images into real space.”

And yet Greenbaum is doing more than simply enlarging pristine images; there 
is always an interesting dimensional friction at play. A print on acrylic plastic of a cracked and broken sidewalk leans nonchalantly against the studio’s back wall—it’s a work, Facing Stone, that
 will be included in the artist’s October exhibition at Kansas, in New York
 City. Close inspection reveals an odd topographic effect: The printed piece of acrylic has been vacuum formed around a set of ceiling tiles (which are themselves faux representations of a rock, such as limestone), giving this piece an altogether different kind of disquieting presence, as the grid and texture of the ceiling tiles awkwardly conflict with the haphazard cracks in the image of the sidewalk. With this piece, Greenbaum wittily refers to both the markings on ancient cave ceilings and contemporary floors and surfaces, questioning the choices we make about covering and resurfacing spaces, whether with marble, faux marble, or something entirely unrecognizable. “I grew up in very rural areas, first in Virginia and later in North Florida. Coming from places like these, I’ve always had an ambivalent fascination with the urban landscape,” Greenbaum says.

Ethan Greenbaum, "Back Slash," 2012

Greenbaum clearly has an affinity with the Formica-obsessed artist Richard Artschwager, thanks to their shared delight in combining flattened imagery within the medium of sculpture. He 
also owes a debt to other 1970s artists who experimented with perception and space, such as Robert Overby and John Divola. Yet Greenbaum is also engaged with a small group of cohorts who produce similarly photo-based sculpture, like David Kennedy Cutler and Letha Wilson. These artists follow one another’s work closely, to the point that Cutler, Greenbaum, and artist Sara Greenberger Rafferty have held “materials meetings” in which production secrets were shared. The three are currently working on a collaborative artist publication that takes the form of a materials sample book, akin 
to what you’d find in a supplier’s showroom.

Greenbaum is ready to take his own production to another level, and he doesn’t shy away from an entrepreneurial approach to artmaking, as he considers branching further into the fields of printmaking and architecture—as well
 as experimenting with wall reliefs,
 room dividers, and even window design. What will remain a constant is the
 visual hiccup that Greenbaum’s oeuvre provides, allowing us to see the spaces and materials we interact with every day in a new and alluring light. “What I’m looking to share,” he says, “is an experience of wonder and estrangement.”

This article is published in the September 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Hair being one of the most common mediums for self-expression, it seems an especially appropriate subject for art. Even when our clothes are off, our coifs define who we are aesthetically as well as socially. Indeed, as Lorna Simpson suggests in this entrancing body of works on paper, everyone is a performer in her or his own life, and our locks form an essential part of our costume.

For her 2007 “Actress” series, Simpson produced a series of graphite, ink, and watercolor drawings on paper, depicting white women from what appears (from their hairstyles) to be the 1960s. The actresses’ lips are pink or rouged, their necklines are often defined by a strand of pearls, and their pale faces, which almost dissolve into the white paper, are rendered with near-photographic naturalism. It is the tendrils and ogees, the undulating filaments and skidding dashes of the hair, that cause these drawings to live.

Of course, Simpson has taken hair as a subject almost since her beginnings. Her 1988 work Stereo Styles presented, in 10 Polaroid prints, the back of a black woman’s head, each with a different hairstyle. And Wigs, her portfolio of lithographs on felt from 1994, provided an index of dos, from braids to blowouts. Both of these early works employ photographs. In this exhibition, although hair is only a tacit subject, it proves ideal for exploring both drawing and other forms of mark making on paper. The “Barbara” series of 2009 continues the earlier naturalistic rendering of facial features of the “Actress” series, yet here the subject is a black woman, her tight curls portrayed variously as graphite arabesques, yellow watercolor flames, glinting jewels, tight ink spirals, or pigment circles. As much as the posture of the mouth, each type of hair suggests a mood and—more so than a moue or a smile—its attendant energy level.

In the 2008 “Head” series, the woman turns away from the viewer, as in so many of Simpson’s earlier works, and the hair, which is described with ink washes throughout, becomes abstract. These images cast tresses as veils, blots through which we might read the face obscured by these amoeboid, cloudlike, or wind-streaked forms. The gestural and abstract possibilities announced by this series are pushed to their limits in the 2011 “Head” series, where again the women turn away from us to display hair that now arises from gold embossing powder hovering like redolent, at times violent, clouds on the merest hint of a skull. In one, for instance, the ink-wash delta of a neck is overwhelmed by swooping gold sediments.

More recently, Simpson has turned to collage, pairing chromatic coiffures with faces cut from such magazines as Ebony and Jet. The couplings nose around fruitfully in all sorts of precincts, from the aesthetics of brushstroking to the sociopolitical issues of black people’s style. As with so much of the very best art, Simpson transforms the simplest quotidian thing into a rare and complex world: She uses hair as a reflection of the culture and to reflect on the fundamentals of line, form, and color.

“Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper” is on view at the Aspen Art Museum from July 26 through September 22, 2013.

To see works from the exhibition, click on the slideshow.

This review appears in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

SEPTEMBER

Zilvinas Landzbergas
Galerie Fons Welters
September 7–October 5
Amsterdam

David Ancelin
Jiali Gallery
September 14–October 19
Beijing

Monika Grzymala
Joanne Greenbaum
Galerie Crone
September–November
Berlin

Sinta Werner
Alexander Levy
September
Berlin

Roxy Paine
Kavi Gupta
September 20–December 20
Chicago

Leiko Ikemura
Galerie Karsten Greve
September 6–November 2
Cologne

Aisha Khalid
Gallery Isabelle van den Eynde
September
Dubai

Shane McCarthy
Mother’s Tankstation
September 18–November 2
Dublin

Warhol, Lichtenstein, Banksy
Long-Sharp Gallery
September 6–October 1
Indianapolis

Neo Rauch
Galerie Eigen + Art
September 29–December 7
Leipzig

Rosemarie Trockel
Sprüth Magers
September 4–October 5
London

Anna-Bella Papp
Stuart Shave/Modern Art
September 6–October 5
London

Alice Theobald
Pilar Corrias
September 10–October 5
London

Philip-Lorca diCorcia
David Zwirner
September 26–November 23
London

Dawn Kasper
Honor Fraser Gallery
September 7–October 26
Los Angeles

George Herms
OHWOW
September 14–October 26
Los Angeles

Robert Heinecken
Cherry and Martin
September 28–November 16
Los Angeles

Danh Vo
Kurimanzutto
September 28–November 1
Mexico City

Fred Sandback
Lisson Gallery
September
Milan

James Krone
Brand New Gallery
September 25–November 16
Milan

Noel Anderson

Luca Dellaverson

Jack Tilton Gallery
September 5–October 12
New York

Alison Elizabeth Taylor
James Cohan Gallery
September 6–October 15
New York

John McCracken
David Zwirner
September 10–October 19
New York

Kerry James Marshall
Jack Shainman Gallery
September 10–October 12
New York

Ashley Bickerton
Lehmann Maupin
September 11–October 26
New York

Morgan Fisher
Bortolami
September 12–October 19
New York

Barry McGee
Cheim & Read
September 12–October 26
New York

Damián Ortega
Gladstone Gallery
September 13–October 26
New York

Paola Pivi
Galerie Perrotin
September 18–October 26
New York

Louise Nevelson

Aaron Siskind

Bruce Silverstein
September 19–November 2
New York

Carol Bove
Maccarone
September 7–October 19
New York

Odile Decq
Galerie Polaris
September 6–28
Paris

Claude Closky
Galerie Laurent Godin
September 7–October 12
Paris

Jitish Kallat
Galerie Daniel Templon
September 7–November 2
Paris

Georg Baselitz
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac
September 8–October 31
Paris

Sanya Kantarovsky
Altman Siegel
September 5–November 2
San Francisco

Devin Troy Strother
Richard Heller Gallery
September 7–October 12
SantaMonica

Theaster Gates
White Cube
September
Sao Paulo

Zhang Lehua
Vanguard Gallery
September
Shanghai

Qiu Jie
Art Plural Gallery
September 13–October 26
Singapore

OCTOBER

Leigh Ledare

Office Baroque
October
Antwerp

Justin Matherly
Johann Koenig
October–November 2
Berlin

Betty Woodman
Isabella Bortolozzi Galerie
October
Berlin

Carrie Mae Weems
Rhona Hoffman Gallery
October–November
Chicago

Julia Chiang
Bill Brady KC
October 25–December
Kansas City

Don Gummer
Morrison Gallery
October 12–November 17
Kent, Connecticut

Oliver Laric
Seventeen
October 9–November 16
London

“The Show Is Over”
Gagosian Gallery
October 15–November 30
London

Amalia Pica
Herald St
October 12–November 17
London

Jeff Elrod
Simon Lee Gallery
October 15–November 23
London

Kehinde Wiley
Stephen Friedman Gallery
October 15–November 16
London

Adam Chodzko
Marlborough Contemporary
October 30–December 7
London

Jerzy Zielinski
Luxembourg & Dayan
October 15–December 14
London

Natalie Frank
ACME
October 19–November 16
Los Angeles

Anne Collier
Marc Foxx
October
Los Angeles

Jenny Morgan
Driscoll Babcock Galleries
October 17–November 23
New York

Justin Bower
Unix Gallery
October 24–December 9
New York

Brad Phillips
Louis B. James
October 27–December 7
New York

Jaume Plensa
Galerie Lelong
October 31–December 14
New York

Christoph Ruckhäberle
Ziehersmith
October 10–November 16
New York

Ajay Kurian
47 Canal
October–December
New York

Alex Hubbard
Standard (Oslo)
October 4–November 2
Oslo

Superflex
Galerie Jousse Entreprise
October 19–December 21
Paris

Aaron Curry
Almine Rech Gallery
October
Paris

Alicja Kwade
i8
October 24–November 30
Reykjavik

Floyd Newsum
Wade Wilson Art
October 18–November 30
Santa Fe

Artur Barrio
Galeria Millan
October 10–November 9
São Paulo

Omer Fast
Dvir Gallery
October 10–November 9
Tel Aviv

NOVEMBER

Rallou Panagiotou
Melas Papadopoulos
November
Athens

Hayal Pozanti
Duve Berlin
November 1–December 14
Berlin

Nina Beier
Galleri Nicolai Wallner
November 8–December 21
Copenhagen

Sara Barker
Christian Andersen
November 15–December 21
Copenhagen

Jack Strange
Limoncello
November 13–December 28
London

Katy Moran
Stuart Shave/Modern Art
November 22–December 20
London

Akram Zaatari
Thomas Dane Gallery
November 26–February 1, 2014
London

Friedrich Kunath
White Cube
November
London

Matthew Brannon
David Kordansky Gallery
November 16–January 18, 2014
Los Angeles

Ruben Ochoa
Susanne Vielmetter Los Angeles Projects
November

Los Angeles

Scott Reeder
Lisa Cooley
November
New York

Dasha Shishkin
Zach Feuer
October 31–December 21
New York

Patricia Treib
Wallspace
November 1–December 21
New York

Sheila Gallagher
Dodge Gallery
November 2–December 22
New York

Isaac Julien
Metro Pictures
November 5–December 17
New York

Leon Kossoff
Mitchell-Innes & Nash
November 5–December 21
New York

Raqib Shaw
Pace
November 8–December 21
New York

Josephine Meckseper
Andrea Rosen
November 16–December 21
New York

Tabor Robak
Team Gallery
November 21–January 12, 2014
New York

Skylar Fein
C24 Gallery
November
New York

Roni Horn
Hauser & Wirth
November
New York

Anne-Marie Schneider
Galerie Nelson-Freeman
November 16–January 25, 2014
Paris

Joel Kyack
Praz-Delavallade
November 23–January 18, 2014
Paris

Takeshi Murata
Ratio 3
November 1–December 14
San Francisco

Amikam Toren
Jessica Silverman Gallery
November
San Francisco

Arnaldo Roche Rabell
Walter Otero Gallery
November 7–January 9, 2014
San Juan, Puerto Rico

DECEMBER

Gary Simmons
Baldwin Gallery
December 26–February 2, 2014
Aspen

Amir H. Fallah
The Third Line
December 4–February 14, 2014
Dubai

Kaye Donachie
Maureen Paley
November 30–January 2014
London

Johann Arens
Paradise Row
December 13–February 1, 2014
London

Ingrid Calame
James Cohan Gallery
December 12–February 1, 2014
New York

Michael DeLucia
Eleven Rivington
December
New York

Ulla von Brandenburg
Art: Concept
November 30–January 25, 2014
Paris

Though he’s been making work since the 1960s, Whitten is in the midst of a well-deserved renaissance. His pivotal experiments in process-driven abstraction were revisited in a major show on view through March at the SCAD Museum of Art, in Savannah, and also included in “NYC: 1993” at the New Museum this past spring. This month new paintings go on view at New York’s Alexander Gray Associates, and pieces from 1971 to 1973 will be shown at Brandeis University’s RoseArt Museum from September 17. In 2014, the Museum of Contemporary Art in
 San Diego will give Whitten his first major retrospective. Scott Indrisek met with the artist at his studio in Sunnyside, Queens, to talk about his experimentations with paint.

How do you work with paint as collage, exactly?

Collage has been sort 
of the keystone of modernist thought. With Picasso, with Matisse. What I have done is remove the paint from the canvas, which makes it physical. I can pick it up and hold it in my hand, I can cut it and I can reapply it. This is the essence of the notion of making a painting as opposed to painting a painting.

Some of the most recent works involve 
the shape of a loop. How’d that come about?

I was having an interview with a German fellow in the studio, and he was asking me the same question. I took a sheet of paper and I tried to explain to him. I
 drew a line coming out of Africa to America, and I said, when I started learning about painting and art history, I had to move from America, I had to go up to Europe. I had 
to go way over to the Far East, to Japan and China, all the way over to Australia. I’m going back and forth globally. It’s a map—
an autobiographical map. That’s where 
the loop started, but as I got into it, it became something more mystical. André Malraux had a theory he called Museum Without Walls, that one should be able 
to travel mentally through all the world’s cultures, the whole repository of human knowledge. Major museums now, their holdings are listed online. You can go and you can punch into the Louvre and walk through the whole collection. Go up to the Tate, come back through the Prado, go through the Metropolitan.


Can we talk a bit about your rather unique technical process?

I make these strips of acrylic beforehand, all in different shapes. And then when I
 put the strips into the wet field of paint,
they relax. It’s very conceptual. Everything comes together with the last step. This is
 not an overlay, that’s an inlay; it’s inlaid into a field of wet acrylic, and when that happens, you get a strange spatial juxtaposition. For painting, that’s a new space. I first saw 
a glimpse of that space in the ’70s, and
I’ve been chasing it ever since. But now I’ve chased it up to a point where I can force it into a corner.


Can you tell me about the painting Remote Control, which will be in the show at Alexander Gray?

That whole surface is poured; it’s not a painted surface. It’s about five layers. It’s like pouring concrete. You build a form, it has to be absolutely 
level and then you start
 pouring. Then the paint
 moves where it wants to.
 It’s contained; in Greek 
that’s what is called
 kaloupi, which means
 “a parameter, form.”


Jack Whitten, "Remote Control," 2013 / Courtesy Alexander Gray Associates, New York

Are you ever actually
 applying a brush 
to the canvas?

Not so much. 
Sometimes, if I’m looking 
for a thin glaze, I might
 resort to some types of 
brushes. But to actually 
sit down and paint with
 a brush, no. I cut paint, 
I laminate paint, I grind 
paint, I freeze paint,
 I boil paint. I just gave 
a talk at Yale University
 and some kids were
 asking about the process,
 and I said, “Well, it’s like 
Chinese cooking.” You’ve
 got to select everything,
find the best quality you 
can, wash it, clean it, cut
 it to the desired amounts, and you have all these component parts laid out to do a stir-fry. And then there is step one, step two, step three, right? And at the last moment, all these ingredients come together and the whole thing takes place 
in four minutes at the most.

And what are the other 3-D forms that are inlaid into the paint?

They come from all over. They are made from molds. One is from my orange 
juice bottle, Simply Orange. My wife and I went to the supermarket and bought a whole shopping cart full of it, $150 worth of orange juice, when all I was after was the bottles. The computer mouse died yesterday. We had to go to Staples to get a new mouse, and the container it came in—that’s a mold. I bought a lot of clams and took the shells and used them as molds. I call this stuff ready-now. Duchamp called his found objects readymades; I make these and I call them ready-nows. All
 of these plastics are different. I have to experiment to find a release that will allow me, once the acrylic is set, to be able to pull it out of the mold. My dealer in Antwerp wears 
a hearing aid. The last time I was in Antwerp, his wife had saved all the containers for his hearing aids and gave them to me. So I brought them back 
to New York and got a very 
good painting out of it, which of course I gave to her. The cooking industry is making a 
lot of nonstick products, and they’re fantastic.

And how do you get the color into 
the molds?


I’m mostly using an acrylic medium 
that is transparent, and the ratio of pigment to the medium is less than 1 percent. It’s important that I keep working with the theme of transparency. I wanted it see-through.


Have you ever worked with oil paint?

In the 1960s. But when I started being more experimental in the ’70s, acrylic was 
the way to go. Oil paint does not allow you 
to experiment to this extent. You can’t do it. I’ll be waiting for it to dry for months. And now that different manufacturers are coming up with different mediums within the acrylic polymer, the range is incredible.

You have a house in Crete where you spend the summers. Do you work while you’re there?

I carve wood. I don’t paint in the summer much. In wood carving you use chisels, axes, saws, hatchets, grinders; you are cutting, laminating, shaping. It’s a very physical process. All of these processes now have gotten into the painting. So the greatest influence on my painting is my wood carving.

What are those airplane models hanging from the ceiling?


These are the airplanes the Tuskegee airmen flew. I went to Tuskegee, you know. My first years in college were there, where I was a premed student. What happened was that one particular early morning in our ROTC class, the base colonel was leading the class 
on weaponry. All I remember is standing up from my seat—now, you wouldn’t do that. ROTC in Tuskegee is some serious shit. I stood and I mumbled, “What the fuck am I doing here?” My buddy grabbed me, but I just repeated it: “What am I doing here?” We were getting ready to take a big test, and I just realized this was not for me. I knew that I had to leave Tuskegee. Before going
 to Tuskegee, my thing was art and music. Tuskegee didn’t have an art program, and I went further south to Baton Rouge. Southern University, they had an art program. State school, segregated. I started studying art and got involved in the civil rights demonstrations. My class closed down Southern University, shut it down. We organized a march. It started off as a protest against the state because we didn’t think that the state was funding our school to the degree that they were funding the white school. This was the first time anyone had protested against it. The damned thing started off as a campus thing, but then it enlarged into a whole civil rights thing. The local clergy became involved, and people 
in the community, and we organized a march downtown to the state capital of Baton Rouge, and that turned nasty. That’s what forced me out of the South. At Tuskegee a professor of architecture had told me about Cooper Union. That it was tuition free. They accepted me for the fall semester. It’s a hell of a story because now you know the problems at Cooper Union. They have destroyed their legacy. They fucked up. Now for somebody like myself, with the need that I had, it’s no longer an option. It’s a pity.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

ISRAEL

DVIR GALLERY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Adel Abdessemed, Miroslaw Balka, Mircea Cantor, Latifa Echakhch, Ariel Schlesinger, Miri Segal

When Dvir Intrator set up
his gallery in 1982, his mission was to support the careers
 of Israeli artists at home and abroad. Now spread across two spaces in Tel Aviv, Israel’s leading gallery also facilitates projects with overseas
 artists as part of its residency program, created more 
than a decade ago. Last year Dvir hosted the first solo show by New York–based artist Tavares Strachan, featuring work that’s showing at the 2013 Venice Biennale under the aegis of the Bahamas pavilion. “Je suis innocent,” a 2012 survey show of work by Adel Abdessemed at Paris’s Centre Pompidou, attests to the gallery’s efforts to promote its artists beyond the region.

NOGA GALLERY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Lea Avital, Joshua Borkovsky, Ori Gersht, Talia Keinan, Jossef Krispel, Oren Ben Moreh, Orit Raff, Alexandra Zuckerman

SOMMER CONTEMPORARY
Tel Aviv
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Boyan, Michal Helfman, Gregor Hildebrandt, Ugo Rondinone, Christoph Ruckhaeberle, Netally Schlosser, Guy Zagursky, Thomas Zipp

LEBANON

SFEIR-SEMLER GALLERY
Beirut, Lebanon; Hamburg, Germany
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Ian Hamilton Finlay, Hans Haacke, Sol LeWitt, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Wael Shawky

After founding her gallery in 1985 in the German town of Kiel, Andree Sfeir-Semler decided she needed a bigger audience for her minimalist and conceptual artists. That led her to Hamburg, and in 2005 she opened what is likely the Middle East’s largest commercial art space, in Beirut. Recent highlights include Walid Raad and Gabriel Kuri’s Beirut exhibitions.

SAUDI ARABIA

LAM ART GALLERY
Riyadh
Focus: Middle Eastern contemporary
Artists: Mohammed Farea, Fahad Al-Gethami, Corrine Martin, Hussein Al-Mohasen, Bassem Al-sharqi, Talal Al Zeid, Camille Zakharia

TURKEY

GALERI NON
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Meriç Algün Ringborg, Gökçen Cabadan, Asli Cavusoglu, Annika Eriksson, Extrastruggle, Sefer Memisoglu, Erdem Tasdelen, Günes Terkol

RAMPA GALLERY
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Nevin Aladag, Hüseyin
 Bahri Alptekin, Vahap Avsar,
 Ergin Cavusoglu, Cengiz Cekil, Inci
 Furni, Leyla Gediz, Hatice Güleryüz,
 Selma Gürbüz, Nilbar Güres, Bengü Karaduman, Servet Koçyisit, Ahmet Oran, Güçlü Oztekin, Erinç Seymen

One of the biggest galleries in Istanbul, Arif Suyabatmaz and Leyla Tara Suyabatmaz’s endeavor is situated among the newly renovated Akaretler Row Houses in the glitzy Besiktas district of Istanbul. Rampa’s 900-square-meter space holds large-scale installations; another room is designated for special projects. Both serve as venues to promote Turkish artists and have hosted works by Servet Koçyigit and Inci Furni.

RODEO GALLERY
Istanbul
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Mark Aerial Waller, Emre Hüner, Iman Issa, Gülsün Karamustafa, Ian Law, Shahryar Nashat, Eftihis Patsourakis, James Richards

UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

AYYAM GALLERY
Dubai, U.A.E.; Damascus, Syria; Beirut, Lebanon; Jeddah, Saudi Arabia; London, U.K.
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Sadik Alfraji, Safwan Dahoul, Samia Halaby, Nadim Karam, Afshin Pirhashemi, Khaled Takreti

Despite its international expansion, Ayyam Gallery’s main ambitions are fostering a contemporary art scene in Syria and, more recently, globally promoting talent from the broader Middle East region. Cousins Khaled and Hisham Samawi first set up shop in Damascus in 2006 and later opened spaces in Beirut and Dubai. This year, Ayyam extended its presence to London with a show by Nadim Karam, and also
 to Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, with a show of work by Mohannad Orabi. With the ongoing conflict in Syria, the gallery has converted its Damascus space into a studio 
and sanctuary for artists.

CARBON 12
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: André Butzer, Gil Heitor Cortesão, Ghazel, Sara Rahbar, Anahita Razmi

In the words of founders Kourosh Nouri and Nadine Knotzer, Carbon 12’s emphasis has remained “firmly global” since the gallery’s inception in 2008. The pair was among the first in Dubai to set up a decidedly international platform, introducing the region to worldwide trends and encouraging artistic exchange. With over 34 exhibitions to date, Nouri and Knotzer have assembled an impressive roster of artists who have exhibited in museum shows at institutions like the Palais de Tokyo and Centre Pompidou in Paris and Australia’s Queensland Art Gallery. Recent highlights at Carbon 12 include Olaf Breuning’s Middle Eastern debut and the first commercial show by Anahita Razmi, who will also be showing at the 55th Venice Biennale.

GALLERY ISABELLE VAN DEN EYNDE
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Lara Baladi, Shadi Ghadirian, Nargess Hashemi, Aisha Khalid, Idris Khan

Committed to supporting up-and-coming as well as established talents from the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia, directors Isabelle van den Eynde and Barrak Alzaid have zealously promoted emerging figures such as Iranian artist Shadi Ghadirian and Lebanese-Egyptian artist Lara Baladi. Rokni Haerizadeh, an Iranian painter also backed by the gallery, has been selected to participate in the 2013 Carnegie International, a contemporary art exhibition in Pittsburgh showcasing 35 artists from around the world, and Mohammed Kazem, another artist in the Van den Eynde stable, is representing the U.A.E. at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

GREEN ART GALLERY
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary

Artists: Shadi Habib Allah, Kamrooz Aram, Seher Shah, Hale Tenger, Alessandro
 Balteo Yazbeck

With a focus on Arab talent, Green Art Gallery has been dedicated to nurturing the careers 
of U.A.E. artists—including established players like Fateh Moudarres and Ismail Fattah—since founder Mayla Atassi opened its doors 
in 1995. When Yasmin Atassi came on as director in 2010, the gallery moved to a 3,000-square-foot warehouse space on Alserkal Avenue and revamped its curatorial vision to consciously present more ambitious projects. Last year the gallery welcomed New York–based artist Seher Shah and Venezuelan artist Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck into its fold.

GREY NOISE
Dubai
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Fahd Burki, Ehsan ul Haq, Mehreen Murtaza, Iqra Tanveer, Michael John Whelan

Before relocating from Lahore, Pakistan, to Dubai in 2012, Umer Butt’s gallery had already established itself as 
a venue for conceptual art from South Asia and Europe. Despite the migration, the focus has remained on promoting conceptually provocative and experimental art in the Middle East. Standout shows from the past year include “Understanding Magnetism,” Michael John Whelan’s Middle Eastern debut, and a retrospective of Iranian-born, Australia-based artist Hossein Valamanesh’s work, another first for the region.

THE THIRD LINE
Dubai, U.A.E.; Doha, Qatar
Focus: Contemporary
Artists: Arwa Abouon, Rana Begum, Hassan Hajjaj, Tarek Al-Ghoussein, Huda Lutfi

Sunny Rahbar, Omar Ghobash, and Claudia Cellini set up the Third Line in the Al Quoz 3 area of Dubai in early 2005 and recently opened a second space
 in Doha, Qatar, spreading the gallery’s influence across the region. In addition to its commercial programming, the Third Line has established not-for-profit programs that promote and support Arab literature, contemporary Middle Eastern crafts, and Arab filmmaking. Last year’s highlights include the Middle Eastern debuts of Ebtisam Abdulaziz and Maha Saab, and new work by Hayv Kahraman.

Derek Boshier has never had the best timing. In what was perhaps the archetypal grad-school, cradle-robbing, star-making group exhibition of the contemporary era, the 1961 “Young Contemporaries” at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London’s East End, Boshier, alongside Royal College of Art classmates David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj, was anointed one of the seminal generation of British Pop artists. One of the most startling fallouts of this initial burst of attention was a controversial 44-minute BBC documentary entitled Pop Goes the Easel (aired March 25, 1962), featuring Boshier, Peter Blake, Peter Phillips, and the doomed, incandescent Pauline Boty in a dazzling, fragmentary, surrealist—and currently unavailable on DVD—collage by director Ken Russell in his auspicious debut.

Instead of riding the media wave to Swinging Sixties celebrity—as any Pop artist worth his soup would do—Boshier capitalized on his big break by disappearing to India for a year. Was he on some proto-hippie mystical quest or merely looking for more colorful package design to appropriate? “No, I just wanted to travel,” he replies in his art world–burnished but still distinctly working-class accent. “I was finished with college and didn’t know what to do next, and I saw a poster advertising government scholarships to go overseas, to India or Canada. I’ve always loved to travel; I’d already been to Spain and Morocco. So I applied and got it.”

Ensconced on a hillside overlooking the Los Angeles River, the I-5 freeway, and Elysian Park (home to both Dodger Stadium and the LAPD Police Academy), Boshier has about as quintessential a view as one can get of the postmodern city he has called home for the past dozen years. Having recently celebrated his 76th birthday, Boshier is at the height of his powers, operating globally from a 1920s Cypress Park bungalow and tapping a new generation of admirers in the local scene, including Ry Rocklen, Laura Owens, and the proprietors of the übertrending Night Gallery, where he’s just scheduled a show for spring 2014.

L.A. obviously has some kind of deep resonance for Boshier and his peers (both Hockney and Kitaj also adopted it as a base of operations at different phases of their careers), but there’s evidence of a special affinity between Boshier’s work and the quirky discombobulation of Westside aesthetics. Even before
 his Indian junket, Boshier’s Pop paintings—which remain his best-known work—had a cool ambivalence toward the semiotics of advertising that had more in common with Beat Generation skepticism than the celebratory relish of a Peter Blake or an Andy Warhol. A painting like Special K, 1961, looks surprisingly like the iconic logo-koans that Ed Ruscha would make his stock-in-trade over the next few years.

If Boshier had taken the variations-on-a-theme route and 
done all the breakfast-cereal trademarks, he might have become a household name by the end of the decade, but he has always been nothing if not inconsistent. On his return from India, he resumed his participation in the cultural scene of ’60s London,
 but gone were the vertiginous pastiches of celebrity portraits, NASA ephemera, and Blake’s Albion; gone the washy red, white, and 
blue iconography of dueling U.S. and U.K. flags, Pepsi logos, airmail envelopes, and metastasizing extrusions of striped toothpaste.

In their place, Boshier unveiled a now almost-forgotten body of work that was fundamentally incorrect on many levels: 
an unholy marriage between Pop and hard-edge abstraction, with shaped canvases full of trompe l’oeil geometric solids and candy-colored Op patterns. These also coincided with the hard-edge abstraction and Finish Fetish painting trends 
that were emerging on the West Coast at the Ferus Gallery and elsewhere, while rather ostentatiously ignoring the politics of mutual exclusivity that ruled the post-painterly abstraction versus Pop art culturescape at the time.

Gaining massive exposure from his contribution to the prestigious “New Generation” exhibition of 1964 (again
 at the Whitechapel, this time alongside Hockney, Bridget Riley, and Patrick Caulfield), Boshier’s “Geo art” paintings served simultaneously as notice of his disinterest in the staking out and defending of art world turf, and his devotion to the ongoing expansion of the contemporary artistic vocabulary—a devotion that would serially alienate the artist’s fans but result in
an endlessly surprising and variegated oeuvre that is only now beginning to be reassessed.

Born in the southern English coastal city of Portsmouth, Boshier is the son of a career sailor who, not wanting to risk being taken off active duty at sea, never rose above the rank of able-bodied seaman in his 28 years with the Royal Navy. There’s something germinal concerning Boshier Jr.’s own priorities as regards worldly ambition in there. He also apparently inherited his legendary social ease patrilineally, growing up in a series of pubs managed by his garrulous father after the latter’s retirement. Stumbling into the British art school system like many postwar working-class creative types, Boshier arrived on the scene with an uncommon air of confidence and nonchalance.

And Geo art might have caught on big time—if Boshier had stuck with it for more than a year: “I’ve always shifted about. Pop was finished for me in 1962. I use the medium that best suits the idea. It’s as simple as that.” Simple or not, in the puritanical ’60s art world, Boshier’s flexibility and curiosity were perceived as fickleness, or worse: “When I stopped painting, some guy came up to me and just said, ‘You. Fucking. Traitor!’”

In 1966, oblivious to whatever pigeonholes his public wanted to plug him into, Boshier declared, “Painting has become
 an inadequate vehicle to contain my ideas and experience,” and began exploring a variety of more challenging and up-to-date vehicles, beginning with a series of gigantic minimalist Plexiglas-and-neon sculptures, which literally took the illusionistic geometric forms of his Geo art into a new dimension.

Within a couple of years, Boshier was mocking the mythic universality of such monumental primary structures in a tour-de-force photo-conceptualist series (also presented as an installation and published as a book) entitled 16 Situations, 1971. In it, a 
pair of minimalist geometric forms—an empty cube with a solid rectangular cuboid standing upright next to it—are inserted 
via darkroom magic into a variety of loaded contexts, radically altering the piece’s scale and significance.

The sculptures are variously depicted nestled on a 1950s ladies’ night table, perched on a hillside seen through an industrialist’s office window, dwarfed by a mosquito dining on what appears 
to be a human arm, and enclosing Gilbert & George in the midst of their famous performance-installation The Singing Sculpture, 1969. In spite of its being blatantly ripped off by Hipgnosis for the cover of Led Zeppelin’s Presence, it remains unmatched
 as a simultaneous homage and piss-take on the high seriousness of late modernism.

The same year (1971), Boshier published (under the anagrammatic pseudonym Roderick Beesh) the over-the-top psychedelic children’s book How Hudson Saved Rock City, which tells of the epic battle between the peppermint stick–shaped Rockmen and their attempts to defend themselves from the ravenous Tonguemen by deploying vast quantities of mustard, the word
 mustard, and the color yellow. Apart from its Kosuthian
 overtones, Hudson’s spectacular illustrations testify that Boshier’s renunciation of painting had more to do with that medium’s cultural baggage than with any withdrawal from visual indulgence.

Indeed, Boshier’s output of drawings, collages, prints, and other two-dimensional media remained resolutely virtuosic in design throughout the ’70s, though he never neglected the avant-garde. May 1968 found him in the midst of the Prague Spring collaborating with artist Joe Tilson on a relational mail-art happening called The Smith/Novak Event, inviting citizens with the most common Czech surname, Novak, to send postcards
to their Smith counterparts—randomly selected from the London phone book. Unfortunately, the tanks rolled in before the penpal circuit could be completed.

Boshier’s politics have always been subtle and witty, but distinctly leftist. In addition to participating in antiwar 
and antinuke demonstrations throughout the era, he designed banners and leaflets and took jibes at Nixon and the military-industrial complex in ragged cut-and-paste collages. Primed to connect with the punk generation, he ventured into curatorial practice with the controversial 1978 Arts Council show “Lives: An Exhibition of Artists Whose Work Is Based on Other People’s Lives,” which included political cartoonists, postage-stamp artistes, and punk graphic legend Barney Bubbles, who also designed the catalogue and poster.

Boshier was suddenly surfing the crest of another cultural tsunami, commissioned by former student Joe Strummer to design a songbook for the Clash and recruited by longtime fan David Bowie to orchestrate the cover of his best album ever, Lodger. Which is where Boshier’s remarkable timing kicks in again. Rather than hanging out and becoming the U.K.’s New Wave graphic laureate, Boshier traveled to Houston, Texas,
for a visiting-artist lecture in 1980...and stayed for 13 years, teaching and reversing his position vis-à-vis painting, which he began to pursue with enormous vigor.

At this point, it’s best to stop trying to make sense of Boshier’s peripatetic trajectory and trust his instincts. It worked for him. His extended Texas sojourn brought him a whole new audience: His large, deceptively rough-hewn cartoon-figurative images of naked cowboys prancing in front of oil rigs segued into ominous, mythologically charged silhouettes that related more to Goya than Schnabel but won over the Neo-Expressionist fanbase nonetheless. Another apparently arbitrary geographical shift landed him in L.A. in the late ’90s, just in time to get enraged over the antics of his recent homey George W.

Always political on many levels, Boshier’s work became adamantly so in response to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, culminating in the masterful “Pantomime War” paintings of 2005, which introduced an Hergé-esque “clean line” aesthetic, a toned-down color palette, and an almost-outsider horror-vacui accumulation of stealth bombers and helicopters colonizing the picture plane. He followed this up with another spectacular body of work entitled “Chemical Culture,” depicting cowboys, models, musicians, and athletes morphing or disintegrating into geometric cascades of crystalline molecular structures.

Most recently, L.A. seems to have provided Boshier with a place whose structure supports his nonlinear mode of being. Earlier this year, he had near-simultaneous shows in L.A., New York, Paris, and London, mostly of recent paintings that seem determined to absorb the contemporary visual culture of iPhone screens into the vocabulary of painting. In October he’ll have two shows opening on the same night—the 28th—one 
at Northwestern University’s museum in Boston; the other at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

But locally the buzz has been all about his films. In the early ’70s, Boshier created a series of four DIY collage films that for some reason have captured the imagination of the
 Los Angeles art community: “There’s all this interest. MOCA’s interested and LACMA’s interested, but first I’m going to show them with these Ooga Booga books people at Gavin Brown’s gallery here, which is Laura Owens’s space, on Tuesday.” Coincidentally, Boshier has been working on a new movie, shot with an iPad. “I’ve got to meet with my editing guy. I want 
to finish the new one this summer, because I have another idea for a film I can shoot in a day.” Could be his big break—as 
long as he doesn’t once again hear the call of the wild, and light out for Saskatchewan.

This article is published in the September 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

To see images of the works, click on the slideshow.

With an oeuvre that includes religiously inflected needlepoints, over-the-top videos co-starring Gore Vidal and Benicio del Toro, and sculptures that pair marble self-portraits
 with 18th-century busts, Francesco Vezzoli has a reputation for going big. He’s transporting a church piece by piece from Italy and rebuilding it in the courtyard of MOMA PS1 (exact dates aren’t planned, but likely sometime this winter) where it will be used as a film-screening venue. The New York exhibition is the second part of “The Trinity,” an enormous, multi-city retrospective that began at MAXXI in Rome and will conclude at 
the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. (He also has a show this month at the QMA Gallery in Qatar.) Modern Painters executive editor Scott Indrisek met with the Italian artist during a sojourn in New York.

What is your ambition with “The Trinity”?

I’m trying to make a surreal version of a midcareer survey show. I’ve realized that I have done so much that many people don’t know about. With this project, it’s freshening up the concept of a midcareer survey—a phrase I hate, that makes me feel old.

What brings you to New York?


We’re here to film a new video in which Jessica Chastain plays a Southern woman who becomes an adept of my religion.


She starts worshipping you?


Well, me or...the work.

And you’ll be showing this film, with others, in the church that you’re taking apart and then rebuilding in the courtyard of PS1. How did you pick this particular church?


We picked it based on availability and deconsecrate-ability, because you can’t do that to a church that is consecrated; otherwise, you’ll end up in jail or in hell. And because it was small and old and it looked like a church. I wanted it to have an ancient feeling. It’s rather rustic, from the country. Stone walls. Hopefully, it will play a striking contrast with the cement walls of the PS1 courtyard. It’s bringing elements of my roots into a space where supposedly such things don’t belong, always some kind of détournement—a sense of sliding, something accidental, something that you don’t expect to find.

How did this concept of three exhibitions in Rome, New York, and L.A. come about?


It was Klaus Biesenbach’s idea, because he kept saying that my work shifts between art, cinema, and religion. And I thought: the gallery, the church, the cinema.

For the first installment at MAXXIin Rome, you drastically transformed a space designed by Zaha Hadid.


I think it is important to create some kind of tension. Zaha is a good friend. She knows my attitude toward things. She stood up at the dinner and said she really enjoyed the mess that we made, so that made me happy.

Installation view of "Galleria Vezzoli" at the Maxxi — Photo by Musacchio/Ianniello/Napolitano

How hard is it to get well-known actors to work with you? They’re surrounded by so many layers of publicists.


The works are acts of war against the system of agents and publicists. The fact that I was convincing enough to get them in front of my camera: That is the artwork. I started with local Italian celebrities who were meaningful for me. In America it is always more difficult because rules are stricter, like unions—I’m not against it, I understand it, but I’m a bit of a thief. I steal performances. I steal images. Now that the work is so big and broad, it’s surprising how many people judge it not from the conceptual point of view but from the point of view of enjoyability. Some people think that because the audience is broader, the work is less sophisticated.

Are you happy to have a broader audience?

Yes, and I think it’s impossible to fight it. Art is a bit of a no-man’s-land, a limbo. I think we’re slowly exiting the limbo—all these new magazines that are sold are promoting art in a fashionable way. They’re not like Artforum; they’re just another segment of the media market that has the art world as its study.

Do you think the art world has gotten more celebrity-obsessed? I just saw Jay-Z’s performance at Pace, and it was a bit weird to see all these art world personalities there.

I was invited to be a sitter, but to me, the invitation looked like a take on some of my artwork. I was surprised to hear that some important artists were going to be part of this game. Because when I was doing my game, I was asking celebrities on the level of Jay-Z to be part of my artwork. Now Jay-Z is asking Marina Abramovic to be part of his videos. So 
I think it is a very interesting dynamic in itself.

What’s next for you, after “The Trinity”?

If I were in a financial position that would allow me to do so, I would love to produce things, sponsor things. If I saw that a Rodarte fashion show was sponsored by Wade Guyton, that would be cool. I think the only possibility today for contemporary art certainly isn’t painting versus sculpture versus multimedia versus whatever; it’s about the role of the artist. Artists are still thinking in the old style, like an artist from the ’70s. Now, I think if I were an artist with a big Chelsea gallery and I had a political agenda, for the kind of money that revolves around one exhibition, I could pretty much open a newspaper.

So why don’t you do that?

Well, I think I am already pursuing my agenda at the highest level. My agenda was to be deconstructive of the media. I was already infiltrating the system at the top level. But if I had a strong political agenda in mind, I would go to my dealers and say, “OK, I’ll do an exhibition with you, but with this money, we buy Il Manifesto [an Italian left-wing newspaper] and we save the most political newspaper in my nation, for the price of a Chelsea exhibition. Real artists could have an impact on real politics. I think the real debate today of the art world is, What do we make of this potential power? I think that when artists realize they could have all this power, they retreat into more traditional techniques, like painting. But for me it’s about pushing the boundary and seeing how many crazy, great things artists can do using all these resources that our industry is now giving to us.

You’ve also got the show this month in Qatar.

It is somehow an extension of this “Trinity” survey. It is called “Museum of the Crying Women.” It is going to be an extensive selection of all the works with crying divas. We’re reproducing a section of the Palace of Versailles. We’re bringing a portable Versailles to the nation 
that is building so many museums—a slice of fake history. On one wall we will put all the needleworks about vanity, and the other side will be mirrors, reflecting the works.

What else do you have planned?

I was approached by the Museo Madre in Naples to do something. I said, “Let’s do a documentary on the famous dinner that Lucio Amelio held when he invited Joseph Beuys 
and Andy Warhol to do an exhibition together at his gallery. And I want to be the producer
 of this documentary, not the director. I want to find the resources and facilitate. After that, 
I would like to commission a nightclub in Milan.

That’s moving quite far from the idea of making an artwork.

Coming from Europe, having grown up with a poster of Beuys saying We Are 
the Revolution, I must think in those terms. It’s still an extension of my vision. It seems like the only debate existing is the one about the market. It’s easy—what do you do with 
the market? You put it to good use. Stop blaming money; use it in a smart way. Without sounding arrogant, I see myself like 
a Renaissance artist. I’m not that wealthy, but there is a potential for a new Renaissance artist out there because our industry is doing well.

This article appears in the October 2013 issue of Modern Painters. It has been modified slightly to reflect changes since its publication.

To see images, click on the slideshow.  

Olga de Amaral is one of Colombia’s great living cultural treasures. After receiving 
a degree in architectural design from the Universidad Colegio Mayor de Cundinamarca in Bogotá in 1952, she left for the United States to study textiles at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan. She later returned to her homeland to take up a post as founding director of the textiles department at Universidad de los Andes in 
1965, becoming an important educator while at the same time developing her work both locally and internationally through commissions and exhibitions, thanks in no small part to a growing network of contacts facilitated by the World Crafts Council and textile designer Jack Lenor Larsen. Her works are owned by major museums throughout Asia, Europe, and North and South America, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum Bellerive in Zurich. Since 1958 she has been the subject of countless solo exhibitions and has featured in important group shows, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s “Modern Design: 1890–1990,” in 1992.

De Amaral’s art deftly bridges myriad craft traditions; it’s concerned with process and materiality, with the principles of formalism, abstraction, and metaphysicality. The artist has developed a distinct voice in her field through her command of conventional techniques for constructing textile objects while progressively pushing the boundaries of orthodox understanding of how textiles work as objects in space. She has gradually moved fabric-based works beyond the category of woven tapestry—one that privileges flatness, adherence to the wall, pictorialism, and an obsession with the organic and physical properties of materials—into a more conceptual practice that embraces strategies otherwise found in painting, sculpture, and architecture. Consider a recently completed installation, Brumas, 2013, which is composed of seven discrete works that combine to make one. Its pigment-saturated strands of fiber create a cloudlike curtain of imagery that resolves differently depending on the angle from which
 it is viewed. Not only does Brumas redefine the space it occupies physically through displacement, but its ethereal array of visual sequences imprints itself on its surroundings. 
De Amaral employs a range of materials—from silver and gold leaf to brightly colored pigments, all of which refer to the landscape and cultural history of Colombia—and painstakingly incorporates them into the fabric structures of her works over months of repeated hand application. The resulting objects are hefty, but they strike the viewer as simultaneously intimate and monumental, a phenomenon that is not necessarily a function of scale. Her smaller wall hangings can exude an energy that exceeds their size simply through the dynamic manipulation of weaving patterns and use of color. Sometimes bright, colorful, reflective, and biomorphic, at other times muted, dark, absorptive, and geometric, these works exhibit the same capacity for creating the perception of infinite space found in the works of modernist painters of 
the last century, from Kandinsky and Malevich to Reinhardt and Rothko. Likewise, her large-scale pieces, both the totemic works and the installations that array a number of panels together
in a space, have the capacity to feel intimate despite their size. 
De Amaral achieves this through a delicacy of execution that softens the otherwise imposing presence of these pieces and also forges a relationship with the scale of the viewer through an understanding of how both art and the body function in space.

De Amaral’s works feel at once primitive and contemporary; they refer to indigenous traditions found in centuries-old civilizations, but their execution and presentation conform to concerns found in our own time. They can appear ephemeral and illusory while also petrified with age. It is this duality that lends her work a timeless quality. Her art is anthropological, exploring ideas found in the way we understand history as it is expressed in objects and how we perceive form, color, and material in the world around us.

This article appears in the October 2013 issue of Modern Painters. 

To see images, click on the slideshow.

“Olga de Amaral: Selected Works” will be on view at the Louise Blouin Foundation, at 3 Olaf Street, London, from October 14-30, 2013.  

For its October 2013 Curator’s Choice, Modern Painters spoke with Milovan Farronato, director of the Fiorucci Art Trust in London.

If space and money were no object, 
what work of art
 would you own?

Katharina Fritsch’s Hahn/Cock, 2013. I find the image of a threatening blue rooster erected on the fourth plinth of Trafalgar Square a potent one.

What can we expect from the Fiorucci Art Trust in the near future?


Cabinet Cocteau, an installation by Marc Camille Chaimowicz: a fictitious domestic setting that this month will have to contend with a real domestic setting at 10 Sloane Avenue, the seat of the Trust. From the end of October through next March, there’ll also be a series of lectures and performances by Italian artists of various generations: from Patrizio Di Massimo to Sissi, from Enrico David to Chiara Fumai. Other imminent exhibition projects will be devoted to the research of Nick Mauss and Christodoulos Panayiotou.

What excites you about London’s art scene?

The Chisenhale Gallery and Raven Row exhibition programs, as well as the 
activities of Cubitt. Tate Modern’s film screenings. Maggs Brothers and the Antiquarian Bookshop on Berkeley Square. Donlon Books on Broadway Market, and Claire de Rouen Books on Charing Cross Road, both of which specialize in art, fashion, and photography.

What other international cities ignite your love of contemporary art?


I admit to having a certain partiality for islands and isolation. I live in London, which is on an island. I teach in Venice. And on Stromboli (an active volcano in the heart of the Mediterranean), I’m trying
to destructure a curatorial project.

Are there any Italian artists who should be on the international radar?


Liliana Moro and Anna Franceschini, certainly.

What’s the last great book you read?

I’d like to linger over the dérive of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, but at the moment it would aggravate my insomnia. The last interesting thing I read was not a book but a painting: a trompe l’oeil by Lucy McKenzie, Quodlibet XXVI(Self Portrait), an image of an A4 sheet of paper with the printout of an e-mail fixed onto a corkboard. The content of the e-mail is a declaration. A statement as self-portrait. I’m interested in the mise en abyme of the act of reading and reading as yet another act of examination.

What’s the last exhibition that left a serious impression on you?


I am particularly fascinated by the concept of reenactment, so it’s “When Attitudes Become Form: Bern 1969/Venice 2013,” curated by means of a triangular pass between Germano Celant, Thomas Demand, and Rem Koolhaas.

What might you be doing if you were not 
a curator?


Undoubtedly I’d be a contortionist. I like the answer Denis Lavant gives Michel Piccoli in the film Holy Motors when asked why he goes on doing what he does (i.e., being the “performer of fictions”). His response: “For the same reason that made me start: for the beauty of the gesture.” With this same answer, I grant myself not only an imaginary flexibility of the body but also a contortion of the mind, to the extent to which I can let my imagination run away with an impossible idea.

Any new musical discoveries?

My most recent and delightful musical discovery is Brooke Candy, whose singles “Das Me” and “Everybody Does” I love: the ultimate level of feminism. But long live Leila K, too, who is probably the most arrogant, authentic, and aggressive female rap star of our century. “The legend slaps your face!”

If you could chat with any art world figure, living or dead, whom would you choose?

Legends should remain legends, but a
party (rather than a conversation) with Jack Smith and the cast of Flaming Creatures would be fun.

Are there too many curators in the world these days?

There ought to be more contortionists.

Some time ago, while I was stuck in one of those art-opening conversations that devolve into show-and-tell inventories of each other’s busy-busy projects and plans, my interlocutor asked innocently: “So, is writing your practice?” To my shame, 
I may have winced: She couldn’t have known that this term, so common in the art world as to pass without notice, is 
apt to bring on the screaming fantods. It’s not even my least-favored usage: My keenest allergy has long been to the dispiriting phrase “time-based media.”
 (It always conjures for me that sci-fi staple, “carbon-based life-forms.”) No doubt you nurse your own horrors: those specimens of critical, curatorial, or academic verbiage that swarm out of some lexical swamp and eat works of art alive. Our examples may not overlap, but we’ll agree on one thing: Jargon — to give it its name — is spoken or written by other people.

Secret or specialist modes of speech, notes Daniel Heller-Roazen in his new book, invariably “institute a division,” though as we’ll see, the split may well be in ourselves. Dark Tongues: TheArt of Rogues and Riddlers is a study in 11 essays of the history of occulting language, from criminal slang of the Middle Ages to Tristan Tzara’s positing, in the late 1950s, a secret poetic tongue unnoticed by literary historians. Heller- Roazen is an elegant and erudite scholar, author of books about the history of the senses, the way languages die, and the figure of the pirate in the era of nation-states. He has also translated Giorgio Agamben, whose 1995 essay “Languages and Peoples” is a whispering presence behind Dark Tongues. Though he’s less polemical than suggestive on the subject, Heller-Roazen follows Agamben in asserting that the concept of jargon comes freighted with political import.

Consider its etymology. Jargon derives from the medieval-French gargun, denoting avian or insect chirping, thence a human tendency to babble, prattle, and chatter. Oddly, Heller-Roazen tells us, there are few references among classical writers (who certainly describe various “barbarian” tribes) to those moments when one civilization abuts another and linguistic confusion ensues. The notion of an entirely other tongue, with obscure conventions to be divined and thus translated, becomes a more insistent topic for scholars and writers of the Middle Ages, and it’s in the 15th century that the practice of a jargon, or argot, is ascribed to outsiders, notably to gypsies arriving in France at the start of the century. As Agamben puts it, “Gypsies are to a people what argot is to language.” Linguistic and political order is defined precisely against those who seem to speak a kind of dangerous (because secret) gibberish.

In the same period, a vast literature arises that details the “exquisite language” of thieves and other vagabonds. These self-styled Coquillards (literally, “people of the shell”) are said to deploy secret names for each other, for the ruses by which they bilk ordinary folk, and for those hapless dupes themselves. (The word dupe, we learn, comes from the French for “hoopoe”: an especially stupid-looking bird.) As Heller-Roazen puts it, “Publications on secret tongues can only be at odds with them.” The history of such volumes is a history of scapegoating and paranoia at best. In 1527 Martin Luther composed a preface to the Book of Vagabonds and Beggars, in which he averred, “Truly, such Beggars’ Cant has come from the Jews.” Even such indigents as seemed genuinely in need, he wrote, would likely reveal themselves “outlandish and strange” once they opened their mouths.

All of this may seem at some remove from contemporary anxieties regarding jargon, be it the sometimes oddly constricted style of writing about art and culture or the bizarrely metaphorical language of management and business. But there are paradoxical lessons
 to be learned from this history. The 
urge to police language in the name of some imaginary standard of clarity is 
an impulse of which we ought to be suspicious — as Agamben has it, all peoples are gangs, and all languages jargons. To accuse others of using jargon is to perform what Heller-Roazen calls 
a “systematic self-exception.” And self-exception is of course what jargon itself effects at the same time as it seeks 
a perfect transparency (untrammeled by the mess of ordinary speech) within the community of jargoneers. There was a perfect instance of this paradox in 2012, when Alix Rule and David Levine wrote
 a celebrated article for the online magazine Triple Canopy decrying “International Art English,” and the chorus of voices approving their diagnosis of a sterile and convoluted genre were rounded on 
by non-native speakers for whom IAE was not a rebarbative jargon at all but
 a practical and lucid medium.

Among the other paradoxes conjured by jargon, or more accurately by the accusation of jargonism, is this: Once we think we have spotted an exclusive 
and occult tongue in action, we tend to find it everywhere. This was the fate 
of the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and the Dadaist Tzara, both of whom, half
 a century apart, thought they had spotted secret names, anagrammatically disposed, in ancient and modern poetry. The secret, once revealed, proliferated so that
 hardly a period, a genre, or an author seemed to lack these linguistic puzzles hiding in plain sight. And for exactly that reason, their discoverers must have been mistaken.

These literary detective stories lead Heller-Roazen to a further conundrum. Tzara and Saussure may have been deluded, but isn’t the kind of obscurity they imagined they’d unearthed exactly what we look for in poetry? That’s to say, “a stratum of crafted impenetrability”? Dark Tongues turns several times to the medieval troubadours, who seeded their courtly verses with the disguised names of the women to whom they 
were addressed. (The pseudonyms, or “senhals,” include “My Fair Neighbor,” “Better Than Woman,” and in the case of one rather bitter troubadour, “You Are Wrong.”) The kind of indirection that we deprecate as jargon in one type of speech or writing may be just what we ask of another — and in the name also of nuance or precision, not just poetic flourish.

Look again at turns of phrase and thought that we dismiss as cant, and in light of Heller-Roazen’s history of
elite and hidden speech we may have to ask uncomfortable questions. Do we really wish to dispense with (let’s say in the field of writing about art) the secret and the strange, with syntax or words from elsewhere, from outside? Are we really even sure that our own language and the blather against which we have taken umbrage (academic or journalistic, philosophical or pop-cultural) are all
 that different — and not, as Heller-Roazen insists, “strictly simultaneous”? Can’t we find other terms to describe the failings 
of usage and style (thus also of thinking) in writing that seems to enclose
 rather than unfold works of art? We are all, it seems, jargon-mongers of a sort.
 I still despair of "practice,"and "curatorial strategies,"and I’m way, way tired of 
art writing. But I may need to find a new name to go with the wince. 

Ugo Rondinone is a bit obsessive-compulsive.
 On the surface, his works appear carefree—naive, even. In fact, they are the result of a meticulous logic that exists solely in the artist’s mind. “At the beginning of the year I know that I have a certain number of exhibitions, so I create for myself a dualism in my head,” he explains, sitting in a small office off the main entrance to the 15,500-square-foot church in Harlem that he is currently renovating (bought in 2011 for a reputed $2.8 million). “If I do something big, I must do something small. If I do something in black and white, the next thing must be in color.” 
New Yorkers may already know Rondinone for two prominent installations: “Human Nature,” 2013, the group of monumental stone figures unveiled this past spring in Rockefeller Center (they resemble rudimentary robots hewn from the rocks of Stonehenge), and his exuberant, rainbow-colored word installation, Hell, Yes!, 2001, which graced the façade of the New Museum until 2010. Parisians know him for “Sunrise East,” 2009, a group of 12 colossal bronze heads that were mounted in the Tuileries Garden. In the rarefied realm of the art world, he is known for his mandala paintings, his sleeping clowns, his sound installations, his bite-size sculptures—Rondinone told me that people sometimes mistake his solo gallery shows for group exhibitions. This year his schedule has forced him into overdrive: In October alone, Rondinone has shows running in locations as far-flung as the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas; the M-Museum in Leuven, Belgium; and the Sommer Contemporary Art gallery in Tel Aviv. By the end of 2013, he will have created work for 13 solo exhibitions, 3 art fairs (Frieze London, Art Basel, Art Basel Hong Kong), and the upcoming Biennale of Sydney.

What characterizes Rondinone’s work is how uncharacteristic it looks from exhibition to exhibition. For the Nasher, he designed a vibrantly colored dock that will extend into Fish Trap Lake, 
the former site of a utopian community founded by French, Swiss, and Belgian settlers in the 1850s. At the Sommer, he presents “Primal,” an exhibition of 59 tiny horse sculptures (roughly 11 inches long) that are arrayed on the floor like a miniature toy army; they are part of a menagerie that also includes “primitive” (birds) and “primordial” (fish). The M-Museum show, “thank 
you silence,” consists of, among other works, hyperrealistic wax sculptures of reclining nude human figures, clocks made from stained glass, and 300 children’s drawings of the sun, commissioned by the artist.

Still, every piece is part of a continuous, lifelong series that Rondinone dates back to 1989, when he was in art school at 
the Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, in Vienna. After growing up in a working-class family in Switzerland—his parents were originally from Matera, an ancient town in Italy where the residents lived in cave dwellings for more than 9,000 years—he moved to Zurich in 1983 to become the assistant to Hermann Nitsch, who was represented by the gallery where Rondinone’s then-girlfriend was working. (Rondinone, the partner of artist and poet John Giorno for more than 20 years, got a twinkle in his 
eye when I asked when he came out of the closet and said that
 he was never in it.) In 1986 he enrolled at the Hochschule in Vienna, where the coffeehouse culture, a remnant of the World War II era, was still thriving. “When you ordered a coffee, a glass of water would always accompany it. The waiter would come back and bring you two glasses of water just to keep you there,” he says. In the Viennese coffeehouses, he learned to take his time—slowness as an ethos would become a major theme in his work. For his first solo exhibition, at Vienna’s Galerie Pinx in 1989, he created a series of large-scale landscapes rendered in black ink that resemble both scholar paintings from the Song Dynasty in China and woodcut etchings that you might find in a German book of fairy tales. “Landscapes are at the root of my work,”
he says. “The whole of romantic imagery is in these landscapes. They portray a nostalgic view of time past.”

When he refers to romantic imagery, he means specifically that used by German Romanticists in the 18th and 19th centuries. Notable for depicting scenes that were both beautiful and generic—sunsets, embracing lovers, dramatic vistas— artists in the movement, such as Caspar David Friedrich, were concerned with the strong emotions evoked by untamed 
nature and the solitary spirit of the artistic genius. “German Romanticism was the first movement to incorporate feelings and dreams and all the irrationality within the working process,” Rondinone explains. They did so to elevate the mind from the crowded confines of the increasingly urbanized (and rationalized) world that emerged during the Industrial Revolution.

Rondinone hopes to do something similar with his imagery.
 As examples he cites specific symbols, such as the mirrors used in pieces like Clockwork for Oracles, a candy-colored installation
 at the ICA Boston in 2008; the constellations in his ongoing “Star” painting series; and the clowns that have appeared in many of his installations and videos, all of which he says are derived from 
the European movement. The visual language is simple enough that even a philistine would respond to it—with love, happiness, sadness, or perhaps, depending on how you feel about clowns, fear. “My work is always very basic and almost childlike,”
he says. “It’s something people can really rely on.”

If the German Romantics were interested in countering rationality with irrationality, then Rondinone is disposed to battle speed with slowness—speed as embodied not only
by digital media and the Internet but also by the pace at which international art stars such as Jeff Koons churn out work, using the power of a massive, well-staffed studio. Granted, Rondinone just bought a behemoth space himself, but he does not intend to set up shop with a swarm of assistants. “One of the powers of art is its inherent slowness, because you are by yourself, you do it by yourself,” he says. “I don’t want to be a Hollywood production company.”

Rondinone describes art as both his best friend and his 24- hour preoccupation. When he chooses a subject, his mind tends to filter out anything extraneous. “If I’m thinking about doors,
for example, I see only doors,” he says. “When I was making the stone figures, I would see all different kinds of stones on the sides of houses. It becomes a sort of tunnel vision.”

Slowness entered his work directly with his mandala paintings, which he made in the early 1990s, right after his series of landscapes. “I needed something contemplative to do in the winter, so I started making watercolors of circles and then blowing them up,” he says. “I didn’t have to think about them—I just had to pass time.” The mandala paintings, which
look like colorful targets, led to paintings of horizons, then star constellations, and finally the newest paintings, depictions of brick walls that he has hanging in the main room of the church studio in Harlem. On the surface, they don’t appear related,
yet they are all named after days on the calendar. Together, they form a sort of diary of Rondinone’s existence. “All the paintings are about space and time,” he explains. “You have a landscape and you walk in a space. Now with the brick wall, you have an isolated space. The targets open up like a tunnel, like a horizon, and the stars are like in space.”

Rondinone says that another progressive logic dictates
 his public outdoor sculptures. Beginning in 1995 with his neon rainbow word installations—including Hell, Yes!—andsuch works as Dog Days Are Over, which inspired Florence Welch’s pop song, these works also include ancient olive trees cast in white enamel, comical masks such as those seen in the 12 silvery “Sunrise East” sculptures, Chinese scholar’s rocks made out of pebbles and concrete, and, most recently, the anthropomorphic stone sculptures in “Human Nature.” The pieces in “Human Nature,” Rondinone says, embody the way that humans interact with the natural world. His claim left me a bit unsatisfied, so a few days later, to clarify, he sent me the transcript of a 2009 conversation with Jean-Marc Prévost, now the director of Carré d’art, the contemporary art museum in Nîmes. In it, Rondinone says: “In general I like art that is capable of organizing a space of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time and language 
and image in an immobile place.” This is the closest I could come to understanding the connections that bind Rondinone’s public sculptures—perhaps, by appropriating eternally recurring forms such as the rainbow and materials like rocks, he’s aiming for timelessness, for something more than the merely contemporary.

Even so, he’s still hard to pin down. In contrast to his sculptures and paintings, Rondinone’s video and sound installations can be jarringly depressing. In Zero Built a Nest in 
My Navel, 2006, which was shown most recently at “Die Nacht aus Blei (‘The Night of Lead’),” a retrospective at the Aargauer Kunsthaus in Switzerland in 2010, a couple argues in circles.
“I think this conversation is going nowhere,” the male voice says at one point. The work embodies another type of slowness, by which Rondinone means a lack of resolution: Nihilism can go on forever. At the same time, the artist is capable of a wry mischievousness, a comic playfulness. In a series of portraits from the 1990s, for instance—including one in which he, wearing a red dress, lasciviously sips a milkshake—he reveals his inner freak.

“Do you have strong dreams?” I ask him, curious about the subconscious responsible for such work. “I never dream,” he says, “because I smoke a joint every night before I go to sleep.” Dreams or no, Rondinone certainly has access to a different sort of consciousness; consider the installation he has planned for 2014 that will place seven 20- to 40-foot-high mini-mountains of neon-colored stones in the Nevada desert. With that psychedelic rock installation to construct—not to mention a church in Harlem to renovate—it might appear that slowness is slipping from Rondinone’s grasp. “You can make your own island,” he says when I ask how he plans to maintain the sedate internal pace he’s cherished since those coffeehouse days in Vienna. “You can open your days as much as you wish.”

To watch ARTINFO video on Genger's Madison Square Part work, click HERE. 

Orly Genger is known for massive, labor-intensive sculptures made of swaths of hand-knotted rope. Red, Yellow and Blue, a site-specific piece that utilized 1.4 million feet of lobster rope, was on view in New York’s Madison Square Park this past summer, and starting November 1, a reworked version of the project will be installed outdoors at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Massachusetts. Thea Ballard sat down with Genger to talk about the process behind her monumental works.

What’s your relationship to the predominantly male group of Minimalist artists that you often refer to with your work?

It’s a relationship that goes in and out. One of the things that really interested me was, a lot
of those male artists from the ’60s and ’70s made work that was so much not about the hand. And at one point, particularly when 
I was making a large piece for the Indianapolis Museum, I was interested in making work that had the same scale as many Minimalist pieces, and the same shapes and dimensions, but was in a way revealing everything that it took to make it. I always thought about it like I was skinning those objects and showing what was underneath. There’s an intimidation factor in Minimalism. I hope 
that my work in some way stands up to that.

Do you hope people interact with your pieces?


It depends on which one. The past works—the larger-scale ones at least—have been playing a lot more with the intimidation factor, whereas I was hoping that Red, Yellow and Blue would make people feel welcome and safe and held. There’s a really fine line between walls feeling like they’re pressing down on you or making them feel like they’re keeping you safe. And that was a line that I wanted to play with. But I wanted to move over to the other side with this project. The intention from the beginning was that
it would be very welcoming and nonrestrictive, and that people would interact with the work.

When did you start working
 with rope?


I started working with the process of this knotting—really, it’s based on a crochet knot—when I was doing a post-bac at the Art Institute of Chicago. At the time, it was less a way to make work than a way to keep my hands moving. And then at one point,
I had made all these different little pieces and colors and shapes, and I connected them, and what I found in front
of me was surprisingly muscular. It demanded this space and attention, almost like an organism. So I started working with more traditional material, using yarn, at that point, but always using my finger as 
the hook. And then a little down the road, I had an opportunity to show a work outdoors at Socrates Sculpture Park, so I had to find a material that could survive the elements. So I found rock-climbing rope. That was the first time I used this bigger material, and I really fell for the heft of it.

You now use lobster rope.
 What’s that material like?


It’s a really dirty process. It’s really filthy. There’s stuff that comes with the rope that’s, like, earth. There are times when there are literally a few inches of earth in the studio. You feel like you’re almost working outdoors.

Lately, you’ve been making smaller-scale pieces in aluminum and bronze. How did those come about?

I considered those two-plus years when I was working on Red, Yellow and Blue to be production years. You’re not being creative, you’re producing. Making these objects was a way for me to keep my creative juices flowing. And the smaller-scale pieces are really almost like drawings or gestures. There was a more immediate satisfaction with them, clearly. But I think my work has always surfed between the ideas of hard and soft: using material that’s soft, but making walls that we assume to be hard. And then working in metal with a material we consider to be more fragile.

When did you start making jewelry in collaboration
 with Jaclyn Meyer?


Jaclyn, who is a jewelry designer, made a piece for me using my materials for an opening I had at the Indianapolis Museum. We were just doing it for fun, really, but it took on a life of its own. 
It’s a part of my work, but it’s also another angle of looking at the sculpture. My work is involved with the body and how people interact with the work,
the process of physically engaging with the work. And then you get to a point where you’re actually wearing it. And there’s always that question of who’s wearing whom: Is the work
 on you? Or are you on the work? It’s about that constant pull between this intimate object, and something that can also exist on a larger-than-human scale.

To see a video interview with Genger, click HERE.

This article is published in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters. 

KAWS (A.K.A. Brian Donnelly) occupies a unique position in the contemporary art world. He shows his paintings and sculptures at heavy hitters like Galerie Perrotin yet still designs and sells collectible toys through 
his company, OriginalFake; this year he also reimagined the MTV Music Awards statuette and contributed the sculptural scenography for the event at the Barclays Center in Brooklyn (the backdrop for Miley Cyrus’s news-hogging twerk-out). This month KAWS has a slew of concurrent exhibitions: “Pass 
the Blame,” at Galerie Perrotin’s New York location; two enormous sculptures farther downtown at Mary Boone Gallery; a survey at the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas; and a unique outing at 
the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Modern Painters executive editor Scott Indrisek spoke with the artist in his brand-new studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

What will you show at Galerie Perrotin?


I plan to have all shaped canvases, graphic shapes that may or may not recall familiar imagery. To make the paintings, I make drawings and then redraw them on the computer, using Adobe Illustrator, in different layers. Then we print these out, project them, and make color charts. With Illustrator I
can Frankenstein all these images together and experiment with many compositions. For Perrotin, I’m also working on flat sculptures: freestanding and made of high-quality plastics that are typically used for eyeglasses.

For those you’re using a Belgian fabricator. What’s the production process like?

Works like these have never been made. The plastic sheets are outrageously expensive, and you can do all this work, and then get some air bubbles—and you have to toss it and start again.


What about your exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts?

That exhibition will be held in the academy’s Historic Landmark Building, designed by Frank Furness and George W. Hewitt and built in 1876. My paintings will be shown alongside the museum’s permanent collection, so it will be interesting to see them juxtaposed with paintings by Thomas Eakins or Edward Hopper. In one of the galleries, they have a salon-style hanging of smaller works from their collection; for the wall across from it, I decided to mirror the scale and hang of the works with my own, though the content does
not reference the earlier works. And I have another project at the museum, the first installment of “The Sculpture Plinth Exhibition Program,” for which I’ll install 
a sculpture, Born to Bend, above the front doorway of the building. It’s replacing the original marble sculpture on the plinth, which had to be removed because it was deemed unsafe. My sculpture is made of two figures, one being 
a faceless version of a certain green character that might seem familiar from childhood, and the second being a character that has come to be known as Bendy, who originated when I was painting over advertisements in bus shelters in the ’90s.

With those early street artworks—were you making a critique of the ads themselves?


It was more of a competition for space than a critique of the ads themselves. I grew up doing traditional graffiti, in New Jersey and then New York. In ’93 I started painting over billboards in the same ways I was doing walls, except I started to incorporate the letters I was painting into the images of the billboards. In ’96 I moved to Manhattan, and around this same time I met Barry McGee, who was in town for his show at the Drawing Center. He gave me a tool to open the tamper-proof bolts on phone-booth kiosks, and that’s when I started painting over the smaller ads in those booths. I then figured out how to get into bus-shelter kiosks, and soon after started to do this same type of work in London, Paris, Berlin, Mexico City...

How long would your altered advertisements stay up?


When I was first doing them they would last two or three months before being removed. I would see them every day on
 my way to work. Later on, though, by the end of 2000 or so, they would only last a few hours. People would break the glass 
to get into the booth to steal them; it defeated the purpose. Some 
of them have come back in the secondary market. The first time 
I visited Takashi Murakami’s studio in Japan, he told me he had a Calvin Klein ad I did
 with McGee; it had come up for auction at Phillips in 2004. I was surprised because I just assumed it was destroyed, but I guess whoever stole it was savvy. Most of them, I’m sure, just got thrown in the trash.

In 2001 you showed paintings sealed inside packaging, as if they were toys.

I was going to Japan and I had a few friends who would collect everything under the sun—cars, sneakers, vintage clothing, Star Wars prototype figures—but none of them really collected art. Nobody in the younger crowd was buying paintings, so I did this series. It was everything I love about toys and collecting and art and pointing out the parallels between them all. Most people who were collecting toys then didn’t think about art. It wasn’t on their radar, the same way a lot of people who collect paintings weren’t thinking about toys. I guess when I was younger, I always felt there was this hierarchy where art was on a pedestal, and other forms of collecting were thought of as lesser. So I made this series of work where there is no hierarchy. Those package paintings are what got me painting on canvas.

Had you painted in art school?

I’ve painted my whole life. 
In college I was doing realistic oil painting as well as life painting. At the School of Visual Arts with Steven Assael, who was an incredible life painter, and Marvin Mattelson, who taught
 me how to paint with a Reilly palette. I would do classical painting all day, and then go out and do really graphic graffiti during the nights and weekends.

The word toy is so loaded. Have you ever been pushed to rebrand your toys as small editions of sculptures instead?


To me it’s the same thing, except toy implies something to be played with, and my sculptures never had a function other than to be viewed. I always thought it was funny how people like to put things in a category and label them. I have played with this idea a lot. I’ve made bronze pieces, but then painted them in bright solid colors to make them appear like plastic. I’ve also made pieces with a toy factory in China that are four feet tall and have the same presence as any medium-size sculpture. In the end my thought process is the same: I just want to make something good and not worry about how it’s labeled.

To see images, click on the slideshow.

Watch ARTINFO video of Roche creating his work HERE. 

To generate its heat, art in its making requires a measure of friction. It would seem that Arnaldo Roche, perhaps the preeminent artist of Puerto Rico since the 1980s, takes this dictum literally:
 He rubs his paintings into being, as one might rub a headstone or 
a façade. Examining his wrought canvases, one wouldn’t
 easily guess how they were made. In a very large work from 2013, Give Him Some Wheels and He Will Run, a nude male figure lies prone, his muscular limbs splayed over the hood of one car
 and the trunk of another, with a halo surrounding his head as though he were a beatified Chris Burden, crucified on a car during a performance. Like all of Roche’s paintings from the past year,
 this one is a monochrome midnight blue, and the images seem to be drawn or scratched into the pigment. Yet to make it, the artist draped canvas (or, for other pieces, large swaths of paper), which he thinks of as a “second skin,” over 
a car and painstakingly massaged an oil stick over its contours, a process he continued with a young man to get the male figure and 
the leaves, scrolls, rosettes, and other ornaments—taken from furniture—that surround the automobiles. “I’m trying to see what I cannot see, by looking with my hands,” Roche explains. It’s an approach thoroughly rooted in 
the islands, this laying on of hands, one that, as he says, runs counter to the idea of the “privacy that is so important to the Americans.” 
In Puerto Rico, he continues, “we see something that we love or 
like and we hug, we embrace it.”

Why Roche is so keen to get past the exterior and to celebrate a sort of agape with his work has much to do with formidable difficulties, the abrasive resistance he experienced to becoming the person he is. At age 14, while Roche was drawing at the family’s kitchen table, his older brother, who suffered from schizophrenia, shot their sister to death in front 
of him, using their policeman father’s gun. His parents were in an abusive relationship, while 
his brother, whose illness was never successfully treated, ended up dying of starvation. As he 
got older Roche realized he is 
gay, and yet to complicate things further, he remains a devoted Christian, albeit a Methodist in Catholic Latin America. So if 
he has been less concerned with addressing the conventional aesthetic and theoretical preoccupations of the art world, it is because his work has to do,
 as he puts it, with “trying to live, trying to manage pain, despair,
 a bunch of shit.”

That’s not to say that by painting he is groping his way toward some sort of therapy. Roche’s is a rigorously formed aesthetic. After studying architecture in Puerto Rico as a young man, he came to the States, earning a BFA and an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago. The city, he says, changed him; 
it disclosed to him the world of 
art and ideas—“a new Roche was born there.” He fell in love with Chicago’s Victorian architecture and with ornamentation, “anything that has silver or gold, that 
is Rococo or German.” Indeed, 
his work and process ought to
 be seen as exploring a dialectic
 of surface and depth.

Far from being dark or weighed down by the past, Roche is in
 fact an effervescent personality, tirelessly passionate, and this has in the past led him to complicate his works—“a lot,” he emphasizes, “because of the enthusiasm that I have about living and experiencing life very powerfully.” Those earlier efforts, for which he is 
best known, were often baroque performances, with figures, lines, and shapes populating every inch of the canvas. He wanted to get everything in. With his more recent body of work, on view at Walter Otero Contemporary Art in San Juan, Puerto Rico, this month, he has tried, he says, “to keep the surfaces as simple as possible.” Which, frankly, isn’t all that simple, though the resulting compositions are less frenetic, calmer, and more centered. Still, no energy has been lost. In Give Him Some Wings and He Will Fly, 2013, a nude Daedalus stand-in stretches prone along tall, slatted garden trellises, which in this drama function as the titular wings. The background is as clear as the sky’s dome.

The actual trellises Roche rubbed for the painting lie heaped in a corner of the studio among other home furnishings purchased at Marshall’s, all of which he has painted blue. His reasons for doing so offer some insight into why the paintings hew to the same cobalt palette. His studio is like his home, Roche says, and he filled it as he would a home, but “then came this rupture,” he continues, referring to his desire to simplify, “and I decided to paint everything blue. In that way, I detached myself from these things, because they were gold or looked like high art”—they were too ornamental. By painting them blue, he was “claiming the identity of things, that everything is the same thing.”

We are all one, surface and depth, the pretty and the profound. Indeed, Roche has often used furniture and people’s personal items in his work. And not just used, because his process entails a rough caress, physical interaction. “How close can I get to you?” he asks of his subjects. “I want to get closer, closer to your belongings, your lies, your suspicions, your privacy. To your home, your car, your brain, your fears.” In his probing, Roche remains apart from the Warholian irony and obsession with the superficial that pervades contemporary art. “My whole thing is about finding what is underneath, what I don’t see. And loving it, taking care of it,” he says. There is no ironic detachment in Roche’s world, no skipping along the tops of the waves; whenever he can, he plunges through the surface. Or as he puts it: “How many cans of Campbell’s soup do I have to eat to understand Warhol? None!”

This article is published in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.

Agnieszka Kurant crouches on the floor of her bedroom studio in New York, where she unfurls what looks, at a glance, like a run-of-the-mill world map. In place of the seven continents, however, it shows a collection of so-called “phantom territories”: nonexistent islands that appeared on various maps as late as the 1940s. Some were invented to score additional funding for colonial trips; others were cartographic homages to a family name or simply mirages spotted by travelers. “For this piece,” Kurant explains, “I work a lot with a crossover of alchemy and magic. I work, for example, with pigments that appear and disappear depending on the weather.” To speed up a process that would usually take several hours—heat from bodies in the gallery changing the temperature by a crucial few degrees—she runs a space heater over the surface of the work, 
the shift causing the territories to fade away, so that only their names remain.

Map of Phantom Islands is among the works the Polish conceptual artist will show in “Exformation,” her solo exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York. The vanishing map offers a neat introduction to the notion of phantom capital, an idea that drives much of her practice. Phantom capital, to Kurant, is “a certain redundant surplus, unused areas of matter—debts that can be capitalized on and very often are.” While the imagined borders of the phantom states dissolve, rendering them invisible, they remain significant in that they shape lived reality. “Even though none of them exists, some of these islands almost led to real wars, or at least to real political conflicts,” she says.

A centerpiece of “Exformation” is the newly commissioned film project Cutaways, which follows a similar logic of making tangible these invisible presences. In collaboration with Oscar-winning film editor Walter Murch (The Godfather: Part II, Apocalypse Now, The English Patient), Kurant researched characters who had been cut out of feature films altogether after footage was shot, for reasons varying from the aesthetic to the practical. She ultimately selected a character apiece from Stanley Kubrick’s The Conversation, Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point, and Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, and, working with artist John Menick and writer Manuel Cirauqui, wrote a script positing an interaction among the three. The actors who originally played the cut roles—Charlotte Rampling, Abe Vigoda, and Dick Miller—agreed to reprise their characters,
who will, appropriately, meet in a junkyard.

“On the one hand, it related to my interest in immaterial labor and how people are uncredited for things,” she says. “Complexity science talks about the phenomenon of the silent hero or silent evidence. It’s all of the people who are absolutely necessary—they need to exist in order for one person to
get credit for something. And on the other hand, it’s about the notion of a new potentiality. What could have happened 
if some of these characters actually were in the film? They would probably change 
its perception and meaning.”

For Cutaways, pieces of dialogue written for each character and subsequently cut are culled from the original films’ scripts. Adds Kurant, “I’m really interested in this kind of hybrid situation of authorship, that these characters were invented by someone else—by different authors. And the dialogue lines are also written by someone else.” It’s a common theme in her practice: For Phantom Library, 2011, she enlisted graphic designers to create the spines for fictional books mentioned in novels; for the shortwave-radio piece 103.1 (title variable), she draws heavily from a Heinrich Böll story, using as well the assistance of a programmer and a team of sound editors. These credited collaborations further hybridize or even destabilize the status of authorship in her work.

The role of editing in Cutaways, in addition to that of authorship, further colors her examination of the function of phantom capital in the realm of cultural production. “I’m interested in editing as a political and intellectual tool, a very basic political tool that is available and that exists in everyone’s lives,” Kurant says. Editors, as she points out, are often themselves phantoms: “Quite frankly, I’m surprised that Hans Ulrich Obrist hasn’t interviewed Murch yet,” she
says, “because he talks about editing almost like proto-curating. It’s about 
the political choices that you make,
and about the rhythm and the music. It’s an invisible art.” Skilled editors, 
she notes, see characters who have been left out, “not visually but in terms of some kind of trace,” lending a magical layer to an otherwise pragmatic practice.

The process of illuminating the invisible generates what she describes as “an alternative economy, an anti-matter of an economy,” produced in tension with the history of conceptual art and capitalism. “I always found
 the legacy of conceptual art interesting, where actual dematerialization was 
just a promise that was never fulfilled,” Kurant explains. “Whereas in a way, late capitalism is realizing the dream of 
the dematerialization of an object. I feel that there are so many things in the contemporary economy and politics that are almost like readymade conceptual work, so I’m interested in excavating this and bringing it to the light.”

This article appears in the November 2013 issue of Modern Painters.