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
Alexandra Flood
The exhibition “Tableaux” represents eight years of work by Alexandra Flood, a New Brunswick artist known as a fine painter of curious subjects: hair, animal tails and, of late, nautical figureheads.
Lisa Lipton
The hills are alive with the sound of global warming in Lisa Lipton’s multimedia installation High on a Hill, in which two alpine yodellers find their mountaintop love affair aborted when the snowy peaks are overtaken by tropical plants.
Erwin Wurm
Erwin Wurm’s art combines a deadpan delivery with mischief, often pushing the limits of absurdity while maintaining an ostensibly solemn tone. Wurm has an extensive international exhibition history, but “Désespéré” (“Desperate”), presented by the curator Patrice Duhamel at Galerie de l’UQAM, is his first solo exhibition in Canada.
Métamorphosis
Istanbul has undergone enormous socio-political and demographic change in recent years, which makes “Métamorphosis” a fitting theme for an exhibition there. The nine Canadian artists assembled by the Montreal curator Louise Déry around this fertile word shed light on these extraordinary shifts via two specific axes: the transformation of nature and landscape and the mutation of the human figure.
Francis Bacon
For the past half century, Francis Bacon has been the malevolent colossus of British painting: a maverick who never attended art school, yet created pictures that continue to both enchant and horrify viewers with their singular vision of a bleak humanity framed by violence, sexuality and isolation.
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.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
Blaring music, a crowded dance floor, countless margaritas and tall women dressed in PVC pants and motorcycle helmets serving canapés out of pizza boxes can only mean one thing: the private-view party at Haunch of Venison for the Mexican-Canadian multimedia artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's first commercial show in London.
Kai Althoff
Kai Althoff is a 42-year-old German artist who works with an exceptionally wide range of practices and media: his activities include traditional image-making, collaboration, relational aesthetics and the plumbing of the deepest recesses of childhood memory and experience.