Barney’s De Lama Lamina, which translates roughly from the Portuguese to “of mud a blade,” was shot in real time against the backdrop of the annual Carnavale de Salvador, near the old center of Salvador, Brazil. The film follows a procession led by a colossal tree that seems to have been scooped up like ice […]

On day six of our visit to the Venice Biennale we made a special excursion to the highly publicized show Sequence 1, curated by Allison Gingeras at François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi. It is a display of works from the museum’s private collection as well as additional pieces created on-site specifically for the show. It had […]

Derek Root’s most recent paintings respond to the found abstractions in images he selects from media reportage. He acknowledges that much of his process for these works lies in choosing which of these images to recreate and—when temptation wins out—reconfigure. Seeking images emptied of content and reference, the artist aims to explore their “formal possibilities […]

Danny Lyon’s photographic and film projects are characterized by a profound personal intimacy with his subjects. His best-known works include The Bikeriders (1968), a photographic odyssey following biker subcultures for which he joined and traveled with the Chicago Outlaws motorcycle gang, and Conversations with the Dead (1971), an empathetic exploration of the lives of individuals […]

Somewhere between the shrouded depths of color and mended layers of texture lies the expression of energy, freed from rational control, and yet still clinging to the outline of a simple object.  Automatic drawing and action painting developed by the Surrealists and Abstract Expressionist movements were in essence, journeys into the chaotic subconscious and the […]

Franziska Lentzsch: The non-objecthood of video art is especially correct for older videos. Most of the videos produced in recent years are produced in an edition of a limited number—particularly due to the ease of duplication. But we have never really considered alternatives, as we are not allowed to. We always buy our videos, and […]

Summer Guthery: The idea for Analogous Logic was born over a beer with Douglas Paulson at Monkeytown. He described an early version of the porn txxxt, that txxxt that ended up being included in the exhibition. He had been added to one of the email lists that lead to an inbox full of porn spam. […]

In a gesture famous in the art establishment, Agnes Martin fled New York in 1967 for a sequestered existence in New Mexico, becoming a recluse at the height of her fame. Lee Bontecou took a leave of absence that lasted several decades; she later said, “I needed a rest.” More explicit was Lee Lozano’s 1969 […]

I’ve been calling myself an artist for about 30 years, so maybe it’s natural that my creative narrative has gotten lengthy and convoluted. I paint as well as sculpt and, in my case, any description of the relationship between those two practices gets awfully tangled. So in thinking about less unwieldy subjects to write about, […]

Yasmil Raymond: Perhaps it is a question of saturation rather than opposites, the choices in this case seem to express a shared distaste for rigid frames of ideological ghettos or the spectacle of gruesome violence. Many of the works included in this exhibition focus on issues of political pertinence such as war (Yael Bartana, Walid […]