Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The exhibition Moderno: Design for Living in Brazil, Mexico, and Venezuela, 1940–1978 is a significant contribution to the study of modernisms and their relationship to processes of modernization. It focuses on domestic design in countries undergoing rapid change due to investments in infrastructure and economic growth, driven by the developmentalist policies of their governments. The home features as an important laboratory for design, where modernist ideologies with broad social implications were first tested in material form. Much attention is devoted to the simultaneous absorption of international design trends and creation of nationalist aesthetics, and to tensions between these seemingly contrasting… Full Review

It is rare for an exhibition to be devoted to a single medieval manuscript. Such a display is impractical, if not impossible, given the fact that in most cases only one opening of a manuscript can be viewed at a time. Thus the display and exhibition of nearly every bifolio of one of the most sumptuously illuminated medieval manuscripts in a single exhibition—The Crusader Bible: A Gothic Masterpiece at the Blanton Museum of Art—represents an extraordinary opportunity to see a significant treasure of the Middle Ages. It is all the more spectacular because this exhibition takes place in a… Full Review

Despite the richness of the country’s architectural heritage, museums devoted exclusively to architecture are rare in Italy; equally infrequent are exhibitions dedicated to understanding the building processes and principal protagonists responsible for shaping Italy’s historic landscape. The Palladio Museum in Vicenza is a notable exception. Since its establishment in 2012, the museum has proven itself to be an institution of international importance, promoting the study of Andrea Palladio—one of the most important architects of all time—and staging exhibitions of profound cultural impact. From September 2015 through March 2016, the splendid halls of the piano nobile of the Palazzo… Full Review

Melvin Edwards’s work picks up where the traditional medium of sculpture—until the 1960s, associated with the production of anthropomorphic figures in the round—left off. The beginning of his career coincides almost exactly with Minimalism’s expansive redefinition of sculpture to include any three-dimensional object classifiable as art. While Donald Judd and Robert Morris were exhibiting their first stripped-down, spatially commanding objects in 1963–64, Edwards was learning to weld. Thirty years earlier, the addition of welding to the tools available to a sculptor also expanded the medium, making possible the techniques of construction and assemblage in materials rivaling the permanence of marble… Full Review

A survey of thirty years’ work by one of New Zealand’s most prolific photographers required agonies of curatorial selection. Fiona Pardington and curator Aaron Lister collaborated for over two years, choosing works not only from institutional and private collections but also from boxes unearthed from under beds. Inevitably, curation becomes an exercise in synecdoche; each selection is a tip-of-the-iceberg gesture standing in for some facet of an extensive oeuvre. The combination of abbreviation and juxtaposition can be dizzying. It also has the intended effect of shifting the focus from the works to the artist, thereby revealing the persistent preoccupations with… Full Review

The Photograph and Australia brings together over five hundred photographs from major Australian collections of historical and contemporary works. These images have never been seen together before, coming as they do from libraries, museums, and art galleries, each with a different concept of the photograph and its use. This diversity is a particularly poignant aspect of an exhibition that overwhelms us with the common evidentiary power of photography. At the same time, The Photograph and Australia refuses the too easily imposed coherence of chronological organization or the categorization of images by technical type or genre. The key to… Full Review

Visitors to the Brandywine River Museum of Art’s Things Beyond Resemblance: James Welling Photographs who are new to Welling’s work might be surprised to discover, on the basis of the visible evidence gathered, that this artist first came to public note associated with (if not quite trading in) an appropriative photographic language at pains to estrange itself from both photography’s claims to inspired worldly reference and the fruit of art-historical influence. Here that negative ambivalence is shed for qualified embrace on both counts, with Welling engaging in what curator Philipp Kaiser calls “an homage” to Andrew Wyeth and a “selfless… Full Review

This review will examine the exhibition of French prints at the Getty Research Institute from June to September 2015, and its companion volume, A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV. There is some divergence between the contents of the exhibition and the book, which is not strictly speaking a catalogue: the grouping of subjects in the exhibition differs somewhat from the arrangement in the volume, while some images in the exhibition are not featured in the book, and vice versa. Together they offer a broad spectrum of prints, elegantly presented in the exhibition and… Full Review

It is safe to assume that museumgoers in San Francisco, home to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), are as up on new technology as any public, and that the Bay Area’s traditionally progressive inhabitants are invested in balancing commercial profit and social justice. Yet as the exhibition Earth Machines quickly reveals, the local Silicon Valley high-tech industry propels a cycle of innovation and consumption that threatens to outstrip our ability to understand and manage its global, social, and environmental consequences. Curator Ceci Moss has convened an international set of artists—Alisa Baremboym, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe… Full Review

Featuring work from 1960 through the present, Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else was one of the most significant survey exhibitions ever accorded a living New Zealand artist. Staged in the country’s largest public art museum, it gave institutional and public recognition to an extraordinarily complex and comprehensive individual practice, and demonstrated the importance of a Pop-Conceptualism nexus to the recent history of New Zealand art. The title of the exhibition and the accompanying handbook—Billy Apple®: A Life in Parts—pointed to the centrality of biography as a key lens through which to… Full Review