Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

Curated by Amy Ingrid Schlegel, director of galleries and collections at Tufts University, Seeing Glacial Time: Climate Change in the Arctic asks the question: “how can something as gradual and imperceptible as climate change . . . be narrated or visualized to tell a story?”[1] The exhibition purports to provide one answer: “through artistic representations, rather than scientific visualizations, created with the aid of imaging technologies.” Participating artists Subhankar Banerjee, Olaf Otto Becker, Resa Blatman, Diane Burko, Caleb Cain Marcus, Gilles Mingasson, Joan Perlman, and Camille Seaman have produced new work for the exhibition or are showing Arctic-based work in… Full Review

“We knew not whether we were in heaven or on earth. For on earth there is no such splendour or such beauty and we are at a loss how to describe it. We only know that God dwells there among men.” —Description by Russian visitors to the Byzantine Church of Hagia Sophia, Constantinople/Istanbul. The Russian Primary Chronicle: Laurentian Text, eds. and trans., Samuel H. Cross and Olgerd Sherbowitz-Wetzor, Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1953, 110–11. A clumsy cross etched into the forehead of a serene sculpted head of Aphrodite; a small amulet case that could… Full Review

The March 1968 cover of Life magazine featured a large black-and-white photograph of Georgia O’Keeffe above a headline declaring her a “pioneer painter.” O’Keeffe is pictured in profile, her face lined and back curved as she leans forward with arms crossed, dressed simply in black. She sits in front of an adobe chimney, and behind her a wide, open sky and stark desert landscape stretch uninterrupted. The Life magazine cover helped cement O’Keeffe’s public image as an iconic American painter of the Southwest, a popular understanding of the artist that has persisted into the present day. Modern Nature:… Full Review

The Frick Collection has positioned itself as one of the premier forums for the study and exhibition of Renaissance and Baroque bronze sculpture. Past exhibitions have focused on single artists as well as on individual collections: Willem van Tetrode (2003), Andrea Riccio (2008), Antico (2012), the private Quentin collection (2004), and a selection from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge (2005). With Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Hill Collection, curated by Patricia Wengraf, the Frick adds to this impressive list with the first public exhibition of the formidable bronze collection of Janine and J. Tomilson Hill. The collection… Full Review

Public Intimacy: Art and Other Ordinary Acts in South Africa presents work by twenty-three South African artists and artistic collaborators. The several dozen works in the exhibition span sixty years worth of production in media ranging from photography and performance documentation to installation, print, and drawing. The exhibition places contemporary South African artists in conversation with several apartheid-era photographers including Ian Berry, Ernest Cole, and David Goldblatt. This dialogue proposes intimacy—a concept as complex and open to interpretation as the countless lives that enact it—as an aesthetic instrument prevalent in contemporary South African art and prefigured in these earlier photographic… Full Review

Intimate Impressionism from the National Gallery of Art is an exhibition of small pictures. By the same token, it is an exhibition about small pictures. Scale matters. Only, for it to matter, for it to develop as an orientation, we have first to break with the usual connotations that accrue to it as a criterion of judgment. Small pictures have their way of drawing us in, of revealing different kinds of relations of people to things; they ask that we view them up close, intimately. In a word, small pictures belong to the interior. That, it would seem, is the… Full Review

An ambitious statement about American art, Take It or Leave It: Institution, Image, Ideology examines the intersection of institutional critique, a practice entailing a structural analysis of museums and the art market, and appropriation, a mechanism of recontextualizing found images and ideas. Curators Anne Ellegood and Johanna Burton show that the two, despite having originated from distinct strategies of practice and consecutive historical periods (the 1970s and 1980s), have overlapped significantly, as reflected in their reception by the generation of artists that followed. Although the two movements have typically been understood as extending from Conceptual art, the exhibition highlights the… Full Review

The work of the painter René Magritte is well known, if not as art, then at least as image. Magritte himself claimed that looking at a reproduction of his works was every bit as good as looking at a painting. The exhibition Magritte: Mystery of the Ordinary, 1926–1938 sets out to disprove this notion, foregrounding the materiality of Magritte’s work alongside his conceptual preoccupations. Foremost among those preoccupations is the resistance—even refusal—of Magritte’s painted objects to operate according to their material constrictions. And so the Menil has set up an appropriately counterintuitive project—the exhibition is physically grounded in our perception… Full Review

Considering Paul Gauguin’s notable impact on the development of modern art, it seems remarkable that Gauguin: Metamorphoses is his first monographic exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and only the second major presentation of his art in New York since 1959. Perhaps even more surprising, this show, organized by Starr Figura, the Phyllis Ann and Walter Borten Associate Curator, with Lotte Johnson, curatorial assistant, Department of Drawings and Prints, foregoes the expected focus on Gauguin’s paintings. Instead, the paintings play a supporting role, along with wood carvings and ceramics, in an exploration of the theme of transformation in his… Full Review

What is an exhibition for? What can it produce? In its earliest forms in the middle of the eighteenth century—the Salon of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris and the exhibiting societies of London—the exhibition was a collective affair, organized among artists: a form of self-assessment and public presentation mediating between a guild of merchant craftsmen and the unstable fractions within the public that might provide a market for those artists’ work. In this anxious context the emergence of the “solo” exhibition, as curator João Ribas has argued in recent lectures, risked the appearance of careerism, conceit, and self-interest (João… Full Review