Most of the insults you might hurl at Jutta Koether’s paintings — sloppy, crude, unresolved — also constitute flattery. Her rough-hewn energy is never more apparent than in her early creations, often featuring garish figures rendered in smeared and crusty oils. In her current summer show at Galerie Buchholz, imaginatively titled 1982, 1983, 1984, we … Continue reading
Laced with easy ironies, Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest forgoes subtlety in its rendering of the mundane monstrosities of Nazi concentration camp administrators through one distinctly complacent family. Aided by the minimalism of Mica Levi’s shrieking and belching score, cottagecore bliss is juxtaposed against an aural backdrop of carnage where occasional gunshots and screams … Continue reading
“Only optimists commit suicide, optimists who no longer succeed at being optimists. The others, having no reason to live, why would they have any to die?” This one of innumerable aphorisms from Nietzsche 2.0 philosopher Emil Cioran is quoted in the opening scene of Rotting in the Sun Continue reading
Piaffe, Ann Oren’s lusty ASMR-laden debut feature in 16mm, pivots around a timid young woman named Eva (Simone Bucio) having to play substitute Foley artist to Zara (Simon(è) Jaikiriuma Paetau), her troubled sibling holed up in a psych ward. Their shared apartment is a ready-to-go sound studio, where pairs of brogues and boots are purposefully … Continue reading
The Tirzah exhibition at SculptureCenter is as basic and enchanting as Tirzah’s music, which would perhaps be best described as mellow melancholia with spasms of grunge. If you weren’t already enamored with Tirzah, you’d probably walk into the exhibition, comprised of just two modestly scaled screens displaying music videos, all of which are readily available … Continue reading
In a basement not so far, far away from whence I came, I saw hell. Or, rather, the charred gates of hell, engulfed in flames, so papery thin that a devilish visitor could tear their way through them in an instant. Continue reading
Natalya Hughes’s The Interior, presently on view at the IMA in Brisbane, is in essence an abstraction of Freud’s consultation rooms during and after the Second World War, from Vienna to London. Hughes cordons off the threshold of her exhibition with a blue curtain on a metal rod, reminiscent of a makeshift hospital ward. The … Continue reading
Stepping closer to inspect the rouged cheeks of an otherwise black-and-white photograph of Nico, I neglected to notice Sarah Ortmeyer’s diminutive DIABOLUS (PROTECTOR), a cast aluminum sculpture roughly three inches in height, kicking it on its side. Continue reading
David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future presents us with a decaying modern civilization seamlessly coinciding with the moldy wear and tear of contemporary Athens — a fitting shooting location for a sci-fi dystopia that forgoes the polished surfaces, spacefaring, and multiverse traversal that other sci-fi dystopias depict. This version of the future offers up a … Continue reading
You might want to spare a whole day, or better yet two, to get through the overload of video works currently on view at the New Museum. For the museum’s main event, Lynn Hershman Leeson, pioneer of cybernetic personae, has at long last been dignified with a retrospective, Twisted, which for some may conjure memories … Continue reading