Author Archives: jolanta

Ever since Damien Hirst’s "Freeze" exhibit, art students in the UK have great expectations to live up to. How to draw attention to their work? What can be truly new, now that warehouse shows out in the East End are de rigeur? A big shout would be too YBAish, but a small yelp won’t be […]

The idea of site-specific installation was originally seen as a way to circumvent the sterility of the white-cube, evade the materialism of the market, and give control of the exhibition context back to artists. Even so, it’s ironic but not surprising that Tara Donovan’s current installation at Pace-Wildenstein looks like nothing so much as a […]

The curators of the Whitney Biennial missed an opportunity when they didn’t put one of Nicole Cherubini’s sculptures outside of the screening room for "Gore Vidal’s Caligula." Their complementary takes on gaudy opulence–equating American pop cultural excess and kitsch with the decadence of a declining empire–would have strengthened the show’s political thesis. Nicole Cherubini Elwyn […]

Leah Oates: Can you speak first on how you came to the media of sound art and what your progression was as an artist?Andrea Polli: Even as a child, I had been interested in mathematics and computers. These were the days when you had 5 1/4" floppy disks and had to insert a disk with […]

At present, the legendary Foksal Gallery in Warsaw, one of the most important places (not only) of Polish art, celebrates its 40th anniversary. Wieslaw Borowski, together with other artists and critics (like Tadeusz Kantor), was among the founders of the gallery and incessantly he stays its director to today. Such famous artists as Anselm Kiffer, […]

With an airy coolness and subversion, Bob Gramsma brings his architectural installation Schwamendingen, OI#0485 to Haswellediger Gallery in Chelsea, New York. An architectural structure of over 200 glass windows and doors salvaged from an old house in Zurich layered into walls, floors and ceilings, this installation stood aloof from being categorizable as a pavilion, a […]

The "Everlandia" project is a collaborative undertaking intended to explore the private world of our imagination and express it in form of tangible, pictorial images. This collection of images creates a publicly accessible virtual world which reflects the private imaginary worlds of its creators, and invites us to explore our own imagination and join in […]

This penetrating volume must not simply be approached as a contradiction of terms reflecting the paradox inherent in its subject matter. A larger truth is introduced by the title: the separate but parallel streams of conceptual and performance art in the formation of postmodernism not only reflect but reinforce the body/mind split in the culture. […]

The following was written in regards to a pair of exhibitions I curated this year. The first, "synthetic aesthetic," opened at the LAB gallery in midtown Manhattan in January, and the other, "plastic fantastic," at the Shore Institute of Contemporary Art in Long Branch, New Jersey, April—May. About three years ago it occurred to me […]

Amanda Besl’s tiny figurative oil paintings combine stark contrast, vivid color and gorgeous texture with the immediacy of photography. She creates images of startling beauty and menace, evoking the swirling blend of childish vulnerability and adult sexuality that defines female adolescence. Besl’s use of paint and her tactile surfaces serve to transform each photo into […]