Author Archives: jolanta

The history of figuration could be said to be the history of freezing specific moments. Following this thought, the figures in paintings divide, in relation to the onlooking viewer, in modes of address of extroversion and introversion, gazing out, apprising or sizing up the spectator, or caught unawares and gazing inward. Jocelyn Hobbie Jocelyn Hobbie […]

The bizarre images of the warbling of pigeons forever gone, the resonance of the elegiac sounds of a city’s fast changes, the spiritual pride of Imperial citizens and the collective imagination of those who want to find a form for temporal and spatial outlines. Flights of fantasy, like those evoked by Huang Rui, the artistic […]

The dilemma of identity, revolutionized more than one century ago by the Western avant-garde as an extroverted self-experience and later reproduced by consumer capitalism into the collective spectacle of our media society, has progressively penetrated the values of everyday life and at the same time left the project of modernity still spiritually incomplete. Art of […]

Greater than trend or past affectation, New York has had a serious in-flux of Chinese photography and video in recent years. "Great Performance: Chinese Contemporary Photography" at Max Protetch Gallery shows us some of what we may have missed since 1995. This show opened in conjunction with a new 7,000 square foot space in Beijing. […]

Building Code Violations" comes from the legal lexicon of modern urban planning and management, targeting those specific individual actions which are in contravention of a normalized and unified social system. In this show, "Building Code Violations" is as a cultural approach directed at a universal modernity actively forced upon Asia. Violations are a MetaphorLu Jie […]

Kristi Ropeleski is a painter based in Montreal, who first gained recognition with her exhibition, "Blood Harmony," in 2003. The focal point of the show was an installation comprised of 16 standardized portraits, each featuring an anonymous individual, posed naked against a blank wall. While all of the sitters actively met the gaze of the […]

The works of art can make a profound impression on us and we often are unable to explain why. We can appreciate art without thinking about it or fully understanding the reasons. Sigmund Freud in Moses of Michelangelo noticed that "the apparently paradoxical fact that precisely some of the grandest and most overwhelming creations of […]

In Nicaragua, a country at the very heart of Central America, a unique art event has recently become talk of the town. For roughly ten days last October, 16 artists met in Managua to change the face of Avenida Bolivar, the symbolic avenue of a city with a heavy past and uncertain future. Murales de […]

From its humble beginnings as the Gramercy Art Fair, showing works in hotel rooms, the renamed Armory Show has grown considerably and is now one of New York’s most important art events, as well as an important example of the growing and controversial trend in collecting and showing art–the existence of the art fair. Let […]

"Those who know Bedri know him for his energy. He writes, paints, talks and flirts as if Benzedrine ran through his veins, hair wild as Goya’s or Beethoven’s. He has called himself a ‘cultural guerilla’ and cultural warfare is his forte. Bedri Baykam Simone Cappa Bedri Baykam, Bruce, Born to Run, 2005. Mixed media on […]