A casual visitor who just wandered into Richard Van Buren’s exhibition without glancing at the name on the wall could easily have thought it was a two-person show. Artist #1, this viewer might have surmised, was a Minimalist sculptor favoring understated geometric forms and nondescript materials such as lengths of wood straight from the lumberyard and neutral-colored polyester resin. Artist #2, by contrast, was a hedonistic maximalist, creating assemblies of jagged polyester-resin elements with gaudy metallic surfaces and extravagant palettes that evoke candy shops, exotic bird sanctuaries, and Italian opera costumes. This visitor would no doubt have been shocked to find out that Artist #1 and Artist #2 were one and the same person.

Martin Kippenberger

Art in America, May 23, 2017

Opening on the heels of Martin Kippenberger’s death in March 1997 at the age of 43, this show, which had been planned for some time, became an inadvertent memorial exhibition. The range of works on view (there were paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, collages, and multiples) was representative of Kippenberger’s anything-goes oeuvre, as was the blend of apparent off-handedness, gleeful, effrontery and calculated vulgarity that pervaded the exhibition.

Nahum Tevet

Art in America, December 2016

Although I have long been a fervent admirer of Nahum Tevet, until the recent exhibition “Nahum Tevet: Works on Glass 1972–1975” at Hunter College’s Bertha and Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery, I knew of the work in question only through some tantalizing but indistinct period photographs. There is a certain irony in this because it is one of Tevet’s guiding principles, especially in his large-scale labyrinthine installations of recent decades, to create art that is resistant to the camera. But it also seems fitting that this body of work—stripped-down, small-scale wall pieces made from humble materials including tape, twine, wire, and wood scraps as well as glass and plexiglass—was accessible only via some dodgy black-and-white photographs, since at the time Tevet was making it, his primary access to the Minimalist and Post-Minimalist art, mostly American, that influenced him was through similar black-and-white images in art magazines.

Jackson Mac Low

Art in America, August 2016

“Jackson Mac Low’s creative activities touched on so many different fields that it’s hard to attach a label to him. He was a major force in innovative American poetry from the 1950s to his death in 2004, as well as a significant experimental composer, performer, filmmaker, and visual artist. All of these aspects of his life and work are explored in the Drawing Center’s show.

Berry Horton

Art in America, November 2016

In order to forestall harassment from local authorities, Redbud posted a sign in the gallery window reading notice: erotic material during its recent show of work by little-known Chicago artist Berry Horton (1917–1987). This notice might have seemed unnecessary to visitors who viewed only the ink-brush drawings of female nudes in the gallery’s main space. In these works, Horton wields a sinuous, tapering black line to depict—with just a few strokes—slender figures who appear to pose for an art class or perform a sensuous dance. However, to anyone who found his or her way into the gallery’s back room and sat down at the coffee table to peruse the multiple portfolios labeled adults only, the reason for the sign out front became immediately clear.

Jan Frank and John Chamberlain

Art in America, July 2014

There is something about John Chamberlain’s sculptures that makes them extremely conducive to being paired with paintings. Over the years, several exhibitions (most memorably at the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex., and at New York’s Cheim & Read gallery) have juxtaposed Chamberlain’s painted-metal sculptures with canvases by Joan Mitchell to amazing effect.

Lane Hagood

Art in America, June 2014

Visitors to Lane Hagood’s recent show had to pass between two literary references in the gallery’s front space before getting to the artist’s six new paintings (all 2014). To the left, the exhibition’s title, “The House of the Solitary Maggot” (taken from a book by the visionary American writer James Purdy), was emblazoned on a wall; to the right was the gallery’s front counter where, in lieu of the standard press release, there were copies of a poem by Chilean poet Nicanor Parra titled “Warning to the Reader.” Given these literary straits, and considering this 30-year-old, Houston-based painter’s past penchant for loading his shows with images from his pantheon of culture heroes, it was a surprise to encounter paintings so free of allusion and citation, so nearly formalist in their means. Read More>>

Bruce Pearson

Art in America, January 26, 2014

Whether by coincidence or zeitgeist, throughout the fall of 2013, New York was full of writerly art: Christopher Wool’s Guggenheim Museum survey; the Drawing Center’s “Drawing Time, Reading Time” exhibition and a related show in the Drawing Room of manuscripts by Emily Dickinson and Robert Walser; Suzanne McClelland’s scriptive abstractions at Team Gallery; and Bruce Pearson’s show of recent work at Ronald Feldman. Read More>>

Susan Bee

Art in America, October 2011

To those who already knew Susan Bee’s work, this show of recent paintings might have felt at once familiar and strange. The familiarity was due to lush, boldly colored landscapes; proliferating abstract patterns; whimsical collage elements; and quasi-mystical allegories, all rendered in Bee’s distinctive stylistic blend of folk art and pastoral psychedelia. The strangeness came with a wall of small, closely hung oil paintings based on film noir stills. Most feature a man and a woman (he sporting a gray fedora, she with a wavy ’40s hairdo) engaged in a tussle (Cover-Up), a brutal courtship (Desire), or simply on the run (Recalculating; all three 2010). Read More>>

Sigmar Polke

Art in America, August 27, 2011

Photography meant many things to Sigmar Polke. At two important junctures of his career, he turned to it as a model for refashioning painting: his early “raster” pictures were entropic enlargements of half-tone photojournalistic images; later, darkroom experiments influenced his wondrous excursions into alchemical abstraction. But photography didn’t always lead into painting. In 1966-68, during his most conceptual period, Polke used a Rollei box camera to capture ephemeral arrangements of objects in his home and studio. With a more portable Leica or Nikon he photographed scenes from his 1970s travels through Central Asia and briefer trips to Paris, New York, São Paulo and other cities, later subjecting the negatives and prints to a barrage of technical “mistakes.” Regularly shooting images of his own exhibitions, he also turned his camera on everything from tiny gold nuggets to a Goya canvas hanging in a French museum. Last but not least, the photocopy machine was an indispensible part of Polke’s studio practice for several decades. Read More>>

Ron Hoover

Art in America, June 2010

The real-estate developers, football players, bureaucrats and politicians who populate Ron Hoover’s paintings and drawings offer a rogue’s gallery of American greed, violence and conformism. Hoover, who died in 2008 at the age of 64, was a social satirist with an eye as sharp and relentless as George Grosz’s. What first struck one in this posthumous survey, however, was not the artist’s moral outrage but his technique: a labor-intensive variant of pointillism that, in its density and optical shimmer, is more concerned with the perceptual than the political. In some cases, the technique nearly obscures the ostensible subjects of the paintings. Without the title Republican (Newt’s) Gift for the Poor AKA A Bloody Boot (1997), for instance, one would be hard pressed to identify the glowing shape in the center of the painting as a blood-dripping boot, much less catch the allusion to onerous provisions in the “Contract with America” authored by, among others, Congressman Newt Gingrich. Read More>>

Christopher Deeton

Art in America, September 2009

One of the sensations conveyed by Christopher Deeton’s richly allusive yet strictly controlled paintings is that of a gradual unfolding. Limiting himself for this show to just two colors—a velvety black and a cayenne-pepper red—the New York-based Deeton created bilaterally symmetrical compositions that seem to open up before you and then envelop you from both sides. Black cactuslike forms rise from the bottom of the paintings while other more slender shapes in black paint suggestive of tendrils swerve out to right and left. Threadlike drips of paint hang from some of these branching elements, as well as from most of the wider, gradually curving frondlike forms that unfurl toward the edges. The drips evoke gestural abstraction; the smoothness of contour and fluidity of line reveal pouring as Deeton’s favored technique. Read More>>

Norman Bluhm

Art in America, October 2007

Norman Bluhm (1921- 1999) is perhaps best known for his gestural abstractions of the 1950s and ’60s, canvases that range from dense fields of glowing color to dramatic compositions of jagged shapes and skittering lines sparring across finely splattered grounds.

New York Scene: Jeff Koons, Willy Heeks

Revue d’art contemporain ETC, L’effritement des valeurs, Number 7, Spring 1989

For the moment at least, Jeff Koons seems to be the artist of his generation, or at least the most notorious one. His latest show at Sonnabend garnered more press than any exhibition in recent memory and for weeks the first question people asked each other at parties was, “What did you think of the Koons show ?” Given the nature of Koons’ work I should probably end this review right now, but for the sake of criticism I will continue. Read More>>

New York Galleries: Chris Burden, Bill Woodrow and James Mullen

Revue d’art contemporain ETC, Figure critique, Volume 1, Number 3, Spring 1988

Chris Burden at Christine Burgin Gallery, New York — Just as for some people Marcel Duchamp will always be remembered as the man who displayed a urinal, Rauschenberg as the artist who erased a De Kooning, Joseph Beuys as the crazy German who had himself caged with a live coyote, so will Chris Burden be remembered as the artist who shot himself. Read More>>

David Humphrey + Ilya Kabakov: David and Goliath

Revue d’art contemporain ETC, L’art du marché, Number 5, Fall 1988

David and Goliath” at Jack Shainman — Under the title “David and Goliath” a recent group show at Jack Shainman Gallery brought together 14 artists from 7 different countries. While most group shows are based on the similarities of the artists involved, this one highlighted differences. As the title suggests, size was the determining factor. While the large number of works and the relative smallness of the gallery did not allow for dramatic contrasts, say a Kounellis next to a Morandi, there were nonetheless various striking contrasts. Read More>>

NEW YORK NEWS

Revue d’art contemporain ETC, L’actualité critique, Volume 1, Number 4, Summer 1988

In a season which everyone agrees to be the least eventful, or the least pseudo-eventful, since the late 1970s, the most significant development in the art world has been effected by the municipal government. Invoking a law that requires all retail businesses to post the prices of their merchandise, the city is now insisting that galleries prominently display the prices of the art they show. Before the application of this law prices were rarely available, even if one asked for them. Read More>>

Schnabel’s Schnabels

Revue d’art contemporain ETC, S’exposer à l’art, Volume 1, Number 2, Winter 1987–1988

By Raphael Rubinstein

Since Julian Schnabel’s dramatic rise to prominence nearly ten years ago, an ascent that both coincided with, and contributed to, an equally dramatic transformation of the art world itself, it has been difficult to separate his public persona from his paintings. Beginning with the photograph announcing one of his early shows at Mary Boone – an image that showed the artist leaping into the air from a New York rooftop (an allusion to Yves Klein’s famous montage of himself diving into a street), through his myriad appearances in glossy magazines and his own statements in print, Schnabel’s life has often gained as much attention as his work. By comparison, the other outstanding American figure of what used to be called “Neo-Expressionism,” David Salle, seems positively retiring, a model of anonymous craftsmanship. In every generation, of course, there is at least one artist who is plucked out of the art world ghetto to become a media darling or media devil. From this point of view, Schnabel is merely stepping into the role previously played by Picasso, Pollock and Warhol. But for all the attention that has been devoted to him, Schnabel’s work has not attained anything like the currency of his predecessors’ in the spotlight. Although he is probably the most popular artist of his generation, familiarity with his work is still limited to a relatively small group of upwardly mobile, urban sophisticates. While the plate paintings of the early 1980’s have moved from notoriety to the status of modem classics, they have not yet attained the status of social icons. Read More>>

ERIC BAINBRIDGE: CULTURAL AND PERSONAL RECOVERY IN AN ERA OF REACTION

Arts Magazine, Summer 1987

by Raphael Rubinstein and Daniel Weiner

Although interpretations have accrued to it over the years, the meaning of Mleret Oppenheim’s fur-covered cup and saucer was originally the plain hock derived from the conjunction of two normally discrete categorie . Quite often for the Surrealists, the achievement of bizarre effects was the beginning and end of their work. Value was coefficient with shock. The danger of this strategy, of course, is that the shock gives way to familiarity and the once anomalous work of art is eventually incorporated into an established category; in Oppenheim’s case the category of Surrealist objects. Since 1936 not only have the Surrealist methods of inducing shock been exhausted, but the very experience itself is almost extinct: shock no longer shocks. Aa result, today’s inventor of acategorical objects must be resourceful as never before. Read More>>

REASONED AND FLUID: NEW WORK BY JAN FRANK

Arts Magazine, by Raphael Rubinstein and Daniel Weiner, 1985

The zeitgeist rumbles and the market shifts; new strata appear and the topographers bend to their work. Lately we have been witnessing the emergence of a generation whose work was buried by the sudden rise of expressionist figuration. While others were rejecting the cerebral prescriptions of a reductionist establishment, these artists sought to ca1ve out a niche in it. Although catastrophic for their burgeoning careers, the return of the figure impelled them to rethink their position and allowed them to work in a less dogmatic manner. Now what looked like had timing seems to have been fortuitous. Their work appears fresher than it would have six years ago. This group of artists weaned on Minimalism includes not only notorious names like Halley and Taaffe, but a number of others not readily associated with Neowhatever-you-call-it. Among these is Jan Frank. Read More>>