Reviews
On Charles Campbell and the Underrepresentation of Caribbean Art in Canada
The Jamaica-born, Victoria-based artist has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and Pérez Art Museum Miami—but only recently had his first Vancouver solo show
On Charles Campbell and the Underrepresentation of Caribbean Art in Canada
The Jamaica-born, Victoria-based artist has shown at the Brooklyn Museum and Pérez Art Museum Miami—but only recently had his first Vancouver solo show
Roger Ballen: Raw Power
There are few contemporary image-makers who capture the essentially chaotic beauty of human existence as well as the Johannesburg-based photographer Roger Ballen. A tight overview of work at the OCAD Professional Gallery clarifies his practice.
NeoHooDoo: Meet Me in Miami
It’s not uncommon, when visiting the Miami area during March Break, to run into fellow Canadians on the beach. But it is a surprise to run into familiar names like Brian Jungen and Rebecca Belmore at Florida’s major art museum. The context—a strong travelling exhibition called “NeoHooDoo”—makes the encounter extra-fortuitous.
Ingres and the Moderns: Harems, Hijacked
Cindy Sherman, Francis Bacon and Robert Mapplethorpe. “Ingres and the Moderns” in Quebec City sets out to celebrate the Turkish Bath master while tracing his influence across contemporary art.
David Mabb: William Morris and Constructivism Meet the Marketplace
For close to a decade, London-based artist David Mabb has been doing mash-ups of William Morris, combining his designs with the utopian projects of Russian Constructivists such as Malevich, Rodchenko and Lissitzky.
Lucy Hogg: Mastering the Old Masters
For her third show in her adopted city of Washington, the former Vancouver artist Lucy Hogg has lined two parallel walls in a narrow gallery with oval canvases painted in odd monochromes—muted plums and raspberries, olive-lime, bruised grey, brick, teal, tamped scarlet and dulled turquoise.
Gakona: Art Goes Electric in Paris
It seems fitting that intrigue, rumours and conjecture should accompany the art in “Gakona,” a group show inspired by a small town in Alaska where, reportedly, secretive experiments with electricity are carried out by the American government.
Elmgreen & Dragset
A neon-pink sign that reads “The Mirror” twitches promisingly above the exterior door to the gallery on a rainy, grey London day. “ADMISSION OVER 18 ONLY” warns a steely plaque on the door. The gallery entrance looks foreign; once inside, I realize that the shelter from the rain only generates a deeper depression.
Giorgio Morandi
It is always amusing when the church of culture (located at the corner of fashion and indifference) finds its hidden soul and solemnly gesticulates before one of the high priests of poetry and aesthetic reserve. In an art world obsessed by public profile and snarling cosmopolitanism, the case of Giorgio Morandi makes all but the most devout cynic or ossified realist deeply confused.
Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940–1976
As its title makes explicit, the Jewish Museum's revisionist revisiting of the primal scene of Abstract Expressionism revolved around the dialectical poles that defined the movement. Yet rather than the titular titans of midcentury painting, the curators took for those poles the artists’ vociferous champions, the rival critics Clement Greenberg and Harold Rosenberg.
Valérie Blass
Parisian Laundry, an expansive three-storey gallery in the alternately dilapidated and gentrified Montreal district of St-Henri, is a strangely suitable venue for the work of the Montreal sculptor Valérie Blass.