Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Amid the symphonic blockbusters regularly staged in the large museums of New York City, the special exhibitions mounted at the Frick Collection in three quiet, elegant rooms on the lower level of the museum offer visitors a welcome dose of chamber music. Striking in this regard was the summertime exhibition of works by the eighteenth-century Genevan artist Jean-Étienne Liotard, whose spare but penetrating portraits, character studies, and still lifes filled the Frick’s small space with a Mozartian blend of lightness and piercing exactitude. Liotard is perhaps best known today for his pastel figures redolent of genre painting, such as La… Full Review

The Museum of Modern Art’s Odilon Redon show was a quiet triumph. In addition to a much-needed and long-overdue consideration of a major figure within the history of French Symbolism, this intimate exhibition provided a welcome respite from the mall-like spaces of the rest of MoMA’s cavernous emporium of modern art The exhibition was made possible by the Ian Woodner Family Collection donation in 2000 of more than one hundred Redon works on paper and canvas, and its breadth reveals Ian Woodner’s deep commitment to Redon’s work, from the artist’s drawings and charcoal noirs to his illustrated books and later… Full Review

Paolo Veronese is in the news these days, enjoying the spotlight in two recent monographic exhibitions. Last year’s Veronese: Gods, Heroes, and Allegories, the Museo Correr in Venice, treated a wide array of the artist’s mythological works. Now, Veronese’s Allegories: Virtue, Love, and Exploration in Renaissance Venice at the Frick Collection, a more focused exhibit curated by Xavier Salomon, gathers together all five of the large allegorical canvases by the artist that have come to rest on US soil. These shows mark something of a renaissance for Veronese, which complements the current profusion of exhibits on Venetian topics: from… Full Review

Leipzig is the new Berlin—at least that is what I have been told. Rents are still what Berlin rents used to be, after reunification but before the government arrived. Many artists have already moved their Berlin or Cologne studios to Leipzig. It is like Prenzlauer Berg or Friedrichshain circa 1995, a combination of advanced, though scenic, urban decay pierced through with startling additions like high-tech (West) German mass transit or gleaming new bakeries and department stores. There is a developed Leipzig scene—the spreading waves of (West German-style) gentrification that includes clubs, restaurants, and of course, art galleries Another sign of… Full Review

The 9th International Istanbul Biennial, distributed across seven sites (Deniz Palace Apartments, Garanti Building, Antrepo No. 5, Tobacco Warehouse, Bilsar Building, Platform Garanti Contemporary Art Center, and the Garibaldi Building) used the city of Istanbul as not only its host but its principal theme. Visitors walked to and from each site, guided by the Italian Gruppo A12’s fuchsia paint on the venues’ façades and windows, occasionally getting lost in the streets of the Beyoğlu district. Rather than finding such wanderings a burden, visitors enjoyed the treats and surprises wherein they were routinely rewarded with the discovery of buildings that would… Full Review

With In Search of Perfect Harmony, a recent exhibition in the Art Now cycle at Tate Britain, British artist Jamie Shovlin cements his recent work’s affinity to what Hal Foster has described as the “archival impulse” prevalent in contemporary artistic production. The three works that comprised Shovlin’s exhibition all take root in the kind of idiosyncratic probing into a history, philosophy, or experience that Foster sees as the foundation of the “archival impulse.” While Foster’s descriptive moniker for this kind of work reminds us that such gestures have already become common practice in contemporary art, Shovlin’s… Full Review

Comprised of one wonderful work after another, Villa America: American Modern, 1900–1950 makes a strong impression. Beyond presenting many excellent works, the exhibition illuminates the visual dialogue concerning style and theme undertaken between and among U.S. artists during the first half of the twentieth century, a particularly exciting period in U.S. art history. With its illuminating juxtapositions of works and its many self-portraits, Villa America brings to life the excitement and energy that percolated within the U.S. art world during this now rather distant era. The exhibition presents for the first time selections from the private collection of Myron Kunin… Full Review

The two titles of this exhibition curated by Phillip Dennis Cate are in many respects contradictory. The subtitle, Sculpture in Paris from Daumier to Rodin, is utterly banal and could apply to any of the dozens of exhibitions mounted in the past thirty years on the sculpture of the second half of the nineteenth century: an assemblage of masterworks, of famous names, of marbles and bronzes. But the main title, Breaking the Mold, announces an entirely different agenda: It recalls the moment when, at the end of the bronze-founding process, the clay form that surrounds the poured metal… Full Review

The exhibition Mir Iskusstva: Russia’s Age of Elegance at the Princeton University Art Museum coincides with several recent exhibitions on aspects of Russian art, mostly contemporary, that have been inspired by last year’s big Russia! show at New York’s Guggenheim Museum. The Princeton exhibition stands out, however, as a crucially important addition to the Guggenheim blockbuster, because it represents a major historic epoch in Russian art and culture that was almost overlooked by the organizers of the Guggenheim show. Mir Iskusstva, or World of Art, was not only the name of a group of artists formed around a periodical with… Full Review

SAFE: Design Takes on Risk managed to organize an unwieldy set of objects ranging from respirators for firemen, giant foil bags for temporary housing, manhole covers, and even disposable sheets for prostitutes who have to make beds on the fly. While curators Paola Antonelli and Patricia Juncosa Vecchierini divided the exhibition into categories, it was the theme of safety and security, real or imagined, that unified the exhibition. The central problem the exhibition addresses is the difficulty in sorting out phantasms from real threats. Contending that most ”safety items” are ignored entirely or lie outside the realm of everyday attention—for… Full Review