Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Chicago-based artist Michael Rakowitz navigates the unstable border between art and life. Among his well-known interventions are the ongoing paraSITE series in which he collaborates with urban homeless to design portable housing shelters that can be hooked up to a building’s exterior ventilation system (a working example was included in MoMA’s 2005 exhibition Safe: Design Takes on Risk) and 2001’s Rise, in which Rakowitz extended a duct from a nearby Chinese bakery into an exhibition space on New York’s Lafayette Street. His current project—a functioning store and import/export business located at 529 Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn—is his most… Full Review

EAST International, the open-submission exhibition that takes place annually in and around Norwich School of Art and Design, displayed its well-earned self-confidence in 2006, when programming material boasted that, “The trust of artists in the democratic structure of an open exhibition has enabled EAST to become an annual challenge to the expertise of the contemporary art establishment. Not a bad achievement for a small art school gallery in a provincial city.” Perhaps to find this challenge we should look to such galleries in such cities detached from London’s monolithic art establishment (Norwich is in the historic capital of the… Full Review

Wall texts and labels in museum exhibitions, often written in bland and impersonal prose, tend to obscure the voice of the curator. The exhibition Géricault: La Folie d’un Monde provides a glorious exception to the rule. Bruno Chenique, an independent scholar and author of numerous publications about Théodore Géricault, develops his thesis not only in the exhibition’s catalogue (which is often the venue reserved for more theoretical art history in the present museum climate) but also, refreshingly, in the thought-provoking, witty, and at times caustic wall texts, brochure, and audio guide commentary. As with any great curatorial eye, Chenique makes… Full Review

One of the first objects encountered upon entering Robert Rauschenberg: Combines at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles was Satellite (1955). This modestly scaled Combine is composed of a sundry collection of materials including a pair of dirty cream-colored socks, two dainty discolored doilies, a strip of worn paisley sheet, sections of cardboard, paint-soaked comic strip broadsheets, and dripping, sensual passages of red, yellow, white, and blue oil paint. This mess of elements is topped off by a swaggering, taxidermied chicken caked in thick oil, who struts defiantly across the paint-encrusted upper ledge of the picture, his downward… Full Review

The Palace Museum, Beijing, the Shanghai Museum, and the Macau Museum of Art have collaborated again to produce a compelling exhibition. The present show follows earlier exhibits on Ba Da Shan Ren with Shi Tao (2004) and one dedicated solely to Dong Qichang (2005). The Macau Museum of Art is one of the premiere locations for exhibitions of art in south China and is the only museum devoted to art in Macau. The present show is under the direction of Chan Hou Seng, the museum’s curator of Chinese paintings and calligraphy. The magnificent artwork of Ming dynasty artists Xu… Full Review

Visitors entering Canaletto in England at the Yale Center for British Art are confronted with two large canvases reunited for the first time in a century: a 1745–46 view of the Molo in Venice on Ascension Day (cat. 54, presumably painted in Venice), and a view of the Thames below Westminster on Lord Mayor’s Day a year or so later (cat. 23, painted in London). It is an instructive comparison that sets up the themes of style, subject matter, and patronage explored by this exhibition. The Venetian view features all of the mature vedutista’s familiar hallmarks, with its frontal… Full Review

A sense of curatorial rigor pervaded many of the compact exhibition spaces of this year’s biennale in Gwangju, a major city in southern Korea known for its rich cultural past and for the May 1980 democratic movement. For its sixth installment, this leading art biennale in East Asia adopted a self-conscious mode of re-examining its raison d’être and selected as its main theme an idea that had in fact existed all along: Asia. Such an inquiry was timely, as the stake to distinguish oneself from others has never been higher for each of the proliferating biennales in Asia—from Singapore to… Full Review

The past three years have provided an opportunity to see two exquisite and thought-provoking exhibitions of Islamic art and the art that influenced or responded to the brilliant creations of Islamic artists. These exhibitions, The Arts of Fire and Palace and Mosque, offered visitors a rare opportunity to see a wide variety of luxury items in an exhibition context designed to educate viewers about the formal characteristics of Islamic art and the dynamic environment in which these objects were produced. Furthermore, both exhibitions were accompanied by well-written and lavishly illustrated catalogues that supported the agendas behind the selection of… Full Review

The National Gallery’s beautifully installed exhibition of Venetian painting from the first three decades of the Cinquecento has now come down, though it is soon to reappear—with a few works replaced by others of equal magnitude—at the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. In both Washington and Vienna the show is comprised of fifty-one paintings, of which at least a third could be described as famous masterworks from one of the richest eras of European art. Many of the works have been cleaned in recent years, and several works appear for the first time after their return from the conservator’s lab. The… Full Review

In a letter to his son Javier, written on Christmas Eve 1824, Francisco Goya mused, “Maybe I shall live to be 99 years of age, like Titian.” As it turned out, Goya would die slightly more than three years later at the age of 82, after four years of self-imposed exile in Bordeaux. But as Goya’s Last Works amply demonstrated, during these final years he created remarkable works of art in a range of genres and media that signal both continuity and change at the end of his long career. This was the third exhibition the Frick… Full Review