Peter Brock, Part I

by Sandra Orellana Sears, March 2012. “I started to seek out greater objecthood in what I was making…” In Part I, Peter Brock discusses his move away from traditional painting and how the preparation of his New York gallery debut has impacted his studio practice. Audio + transcript below. Artwrit: Well we’re here with Artwrit and we…

The Ungovernables at the New Museum, New York

by Jody Lee, March 2012 The Ungovernables, the second New Museum of Contemporary Art triennial, gathers thirty-four artists and collectives from visits to twenty countries by curator Eungie Joo. The artists came of age between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, in a time characterized by “economic upheaval, changes in the geopolitical landscape and urgency about…

David Hockney at the Royal Academy, London

by Sascha Feldman, March 2012 With each landscape in A Bigger Picture at the Royal Academy, Hockney has captured and conjured the unique character of a physical space, each possessing a distinct quality of light, temperature and atmosphere. The saturated hues and tones of Hockney’s years in California flood into his native Yorkshire fields, and recognizable vistas…

The Dinner Party at the Brooklyn Museum, New York

by India Nicholas, March 2012 Upon entering the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art in the center of the Brooklyn Museum, you are overcome with anticipation. The centerpiece of the gallery—and what, no doubt, draws you to it in the first place—is Judy Chicago’s famous piece The Dinner Party, on permanent display since 2007. Hidden…

Yayoi Kusama at Tate Modern, London

by Echo Hopkins, March 2012 Yayoi Kusama’s retrospective at the Tate Modern marks the artist’s largest exhibition in the UK and plunges viewers into the world she has created for over fifty years. As one of the most prominent contemporary Japanese artists, Kusama broke from her traditional academic training early on, taking queues from Surrealism…

Carlos Amorales at Yvon Lambert, Paris

by Danny Kopel, March 2012 The first room of La Langue des Morts, Carlos Amorales’s most recent turn at Yvon Lambert, proposes no major departure from the Mexican artist’s hard-edged graphic aesthetic, a starkness and palette (mostly black, white and red) that hearkens to visual modes employed by propagandistic agendas. Amorales creates work with pictures culled…

Portland2012 at Disjecta, Portland

by Sarah Vaeth, March 2012 I’ll reiterate a complaint aired about Disjecta’s first (2010) biennial: Portland2012 is much too dispersed. Curated by Prudence Roberts, twenty-four Oregon artists and artist-teams have been selected for five venues, in staggered periods beginning in late February and ending in May. As of this review, two venues have opened, so this won’t…

Whitney Biennial 2012, New York

by Tom McGlynn, March 2012 The most effective installation of work at the 2012 Biennial occurs in the “Untitled” restaurant in the basement of the museum. Directly above the dining area hangs a painting of a vacant floor in the Whitney by the British conceptual art group Art and Language. While they are not listed…