Author Archives: jolanta

Last Gulp Publishing and Grand Central Press present The Saddest Place on Earth, a retrospective of the past five years of Camille Rose Garcia’s work. Her unique style uses luscious color compositions and a heavy lean on the narrative to really pack a punch. The characters she creates are Ed Gorey meets Warner Bros. meets […]

The spectacle of today’s media is dominated by imagery of war and celebrity. The most subversive images might include such atrocities as a photograph of Drew Barrymore without her make-up, stripped of her red carpet status. Truly subversive and grotesque images of war rarely exist (of the Thomas Hirschhorn vein) because, although freedom of speech […]

Voltaire took great pleasure in building straw men from the excessive personalities on parade during his time. He would stand the straw men on their heads and with barbed wit cut to ribbons their self-serving and simple visions of the world. With that same skill he dissected the clowns posing as royals. He displayed their […]

In 1993, the Chinese artist Fang Lijun was first shown in Berlin as a participant in the group exhibition "China Avant-Garde" where he presented his flashy colourful paintings. Fang who represents modern China with his works was back in town with a solo exhibition of his woodcuts and drawings at the Kupferstichkabinett Berlin Museum of […]

The inhabitants of Buenos Aires are called portenos and they refer to their city as the Big Apple. The similarities with the north-east Big Apple do not end there. Like New York, Buenos Aires is a checkerboard of neighborhoods. The city has 22 barrios. The biggest is Palermo, home to J.L. Borges, which is subdivided […]

It all started with the "Big Bang." That was a big deal, and now we’re all trying to see the "Big Picture." Seems whichever way we turn today we’re confronted with "bigness." "Bigger is better" became the macho credo for artists in New York with the ascension of Abstract Expressionism. Little Women Curator James Kalm […]

The progression of Modern British Art through the past 25 years is something to celebrate, no? Well, I thought so, but upon viewing the exhibition "Revelation: Reflecting British Art in the Arts Council Collection" at Salford’s the Lowry Gallery, it would appear as if I was the only one who thought there was cause for […]

Lars Fisk’s second solo show at Taxter and Spengemann, a laconic presentation, consists of just three pieces but like a young gladiator just beginning to flex his muscles, he delivers a powerful punch. Trashcan is the most arresting piece here. What looks like a life-sized slightly dented garbage pail turns out to be meticulously carved […]

A few years back a friend and I decided to look up the Ä–cole Freudienne de Paris, the group founded by the great psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan to carry on his work. We ended up as winter night fell on a silent, gray Parisian street with a series of unmarked doors stretching into the fog. […]

Staged via various media, Nathaniel Stern’s work enacts the interstices of body, language and technology. It seeks to force us to look again at the relationships between the three, and invites us to experiment with their relation. His body of work can, perhaps, be described as an exploration of the interstitial itself–revisiting between technology and […]