"Kirk is specifically taken with the story of Minerva—goddess of wisdom—and her pet owl, who symbolizes knowledge acquired through trial and error; cultivating wisdom through the process of making mistakes. His neon orange sunsets and sci-fi skyscraper vistas, painted with Gorilla Glue and spray paint, function as markers of time, change, and spirituality."

By Jennifer Piejko – 17 February 2023

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"In another dynamic paired presentation, Vielmetter’s booth mixes large-scale pencil drawings of surreal people, animals, and plants by British-born painter Nicola Tyson with abstract, mixed-media sculptures by American artist Arlene Shechet."

By Paul Laster – 17 February 2023

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"As part of the Frieze Projects programme at Frieze Los Angeles, Ochoa is resurrecting the CLASS: C van, exhibiting ‘Las Tortillas’, a series of bronze tortilla sculptures that pay homage to both the food and his family’s history as tortilla purveyors. In parallel, working in partnership with the fair, Revolution Carts – maker of the first hot food vending cart approved by the LA County Department of Health – and local street vendor advocacy groups, Ochoa will design the graphics for a custom ‘street legal’ food vending cart, which will be unveiled and donated to a local vendor at the fair. As well as directly benefitting this community, the gesture is intended to raise awareness of the history, contributions and ongoing ‘hustle’ of Los Angeles’ street vendors, whose economic and cultural impact on the city is, Ochoa says, unrecognized and undervalued."

By Patricia Escarcega – 15 February 2023

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"Now, for the first time since 2005, Ochoa is opening the doors of his storied and rather rusty van to the public again, parking it on the tarmac of the Santa Monica airport for the run of Frieze Los Angeles there (Feb. 16-19). Its engine is shot, so this time the van, known as “Class: C” (after the standard type of driver’s license needed to operate it), will be towed into place."

By Jori Finkel – 13 February 2023

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"From the couture-inflected to the conceptual, minimal and visceral, the portraiture-centered group show, It’s Time, features six artists offering urgently needed updates to our culture’s definition of beauty. Next door, painter Forrest Kirk’s landscape-shredding solo exhibition, The Owl of Minerva Flies at Dusk, upends pastoral quietude with disruptive materiality and a suspicious attitude toward perfection. Each of these artists in their own way takes aim at the persistently unwise restrictions imposed by conventional cultural paradigms — and they offer some compelling alternatives."

By Shana Nys Dambrot – 10 February 2023

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"Based in Austin, Roberts creates powerful collages of mostly Black adolescents. Splicing elements from varying sources – Michelle Obama’s hands, the eyes of James Baldwin – she uses heavily textured collages to explore “the multiplicity” of Blackness. “Do not think of people of colour as this monolithic idea,” she says, “but as individuals.”

By Katy Hessel – 6 February 2023

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"The New Museum exhibition will be the first time the whole building is turned over to a single artist. It will trace the continuity of Mutu’s thinking over the past 25 years as well as the profound impact her part-time move back to Kenya has had on her practice, especially her shift from the complex and lush collaged-based works on paper that brought her fame in the 2000s to a more recent focus on large-scale sculpture, installation, film and performance."

By Aruna D'Souza – 8 February 2023

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"In 2012 I started working in ceramics (again.) By again I mean I did it in high school and before that, like many did, as a child at a local community center. First I made porcelain animal figures and then started throwing on the wheel. The pieces pictured here were made during the pandemic, between 2020 and 2022. They were shown in the solo exhibition Forest for the Trees (2022 at Vielmetter Los Angeles), installed with stumps and rocks and paintings. I thought it would be nice to show them “up close” since you can’t touch the art in an art show and pick them up."

By Stanya Kahn – February 2023

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"Themes of representation also appear in a gorgeous show, "It’s Time," at Vielmetter Los Angeles where the work of artists Kwesi Botchway, Genevieve Gaignard, Rodney McMillian, Wangechi Mutu, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya are in conversation with the portraiture of Kwame Brathwaite, who is widely known for his photographic documentation of the Black is Beautiful movement of the 1960s and '70s. The exhibition title, "It’s Time," is a nod to the 1962 jazz album by Max Roach featuring Abbey Lincoln. It not only refers to the Civil Rights and Black Arts Movements of the period, but also suggests that now is still “the time” to prioritize the movement and efforts towards true liberation and representation for all."

By Dominique Clayton – February 2023

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"There are historical moments that transform the industry standard, and sometimes they have deep, traceable roots. An opportunity to understand this process is provided by an exhibition of artist Nicole Eisenman’s work opening in March at Munich’s Museum Brandhorst. Curated by Monika Bayer-Wermuth and Mark Godfrey, the show, especially its revisitation of startlingly explicit lesbian works from the 1990s, will allow viewers to enjoy Eisenman’s beautiful, widely appreciated, and highly valued artworks. The fifty-seven-year-old, French-born, New York–raised painter, sculptor, and creator of wild, passionate murals and drawings has taken a bad-boy, oppositional, and sometimes dramatically risky path to becoming one of the world’s most successful living artists. Somehow, the seas parted and—at times in spite of herself—Eisenman has thrived, has been approved of, and is now in some ways iconic. Beyond the quality of her work, how did it happen that exclusionary criteria that kept a range of lesbian imagery out of the mainstream were lifted?"

By Sarah Schulman- February 2023

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‘I am grateful for the opportunity to show work I care about, to make new things and to show work at the fair for out-of-town visitors who may have missed my recent show (which was unlike anything I’ve made before). Ruinart describes a commitment to sustainability and understanding of biodiversity which seems crucial, [and] mandatory if we’re to survive,’ Kahn tells Wallpaper*. 

By Harriet Lloyd-Smith, January 27

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"Across Gaignard’s works are themes of beauty. Without looking closely, you could become swept up in her delightful pastel palette, romantic floral motifs, and swanky style. But the artist uses this to elicit dialogue around the intricacies of race and cultural identity. Likely best known for her self-portraits, Gaignard makes installations and mixed-media collage, creating her own visual language that illuminates racial injustice. She unabashedly centers Blackness and cleverly entices us to consider the most unsettling parts of American culture and anti-Blackness. Look What We’ve Become takes the object of a vintage hand mirror, used to beautify and adorn, and asks us to take this quiet moment to really look at ourselves. Who is impacted by an intrusive gaze? Who has the freedom to look away?"

By Shaquille Heath – 19 January 2023

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"In the opening essay of filmmaker Nora Ephron’s 2006 book I Feel Bad About My Neck, and Other Thoughts on Being a Woman, she reflects on the experience of getting older in her signature, cleverly confessional style: “That’s another thing about being a certain age that I’ve noticed: I try as much as possible not to look in the mirror. If I pass a mirror, I avert my eyes. If I must look into it, I begin by squinting, so that if anything really bad is looking back at me, I am already halfway to closing my eyes to ward off the sight.” Few would disagree that Ephron, as a perfector of the rom-com and the personal essay, is as sharp-eyed an observer of women’s experiences as they come. But rarely has her name been invoked in relation to feminist art of the 1980s, with its emphasis on deconstructing “woman as image.” Nevertheless, as I was walking through Mary Kelly’s show at Vielmetter—an installation of her work Interim, Part I: Corpus, 1984–85—the comedienne, to my own surprise, immediately came to mind."

By Ashton Cooper – January 2023

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VIEWING PLEASURE: PAUL MPAGI SEPUYA by Michael Anthony Hall, Photography by Courtney Coles

As the sun rose, revealing a white light that illuminated everything it could touch, 19th-century European and North American photographers captured their subjects in Daylight Studios—what many consider to be the inception of portraiture. Subverting these beginnings with diverse, nude subjects and revealing the frame in full—including the camera and photographer—Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio is artist Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s series that pays homage to the original Daylight Studios while examining the qualities that compose each image. […]

V MAGAZINE, November 25, 2022

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Questionnaire — In Pursuit of the Masquerade My Barbarian in Conversation with Jazmina Figueroa
“We were born Generation X, officially, which is embarrassing to admit but true,” says interdisciplinary artist and member of My Barbarian Alexandro Segade, speaking about the collective similitude within the group, which includes performer and writer Malik Gaines and actress and artist Jade Gordon. Some of the defining characteristics of those born in Generation X have to do with burgeoning youth cultures amid the AIDS epidemic and the disintegration of the Eastern Bloc — those who were strongly affiliated with underground, outlier, and/or queer scenes alongside major cinematic and music franchises. […]

FLASH ART #341 WINTER 2022-23

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Andrea Bowers — An Ethos of Resistance by Jessica Simmons-Reid
[…] Andrea Bowers, whose work has long plumbed the methodologies of social justice movements, culls from this archive for a series of works entitled Letters to an Army of Three (2005) (works that, crucially, predate both the Trump era and the cataclysmic collapse of Roe). She displays the gathered correspondence, which she learned of during a visit with Maginnis, at the meeting point of two walls, with the printed letters emanating outward from the crux like an open book. A single-channel video of various people carefully reciting the contents of specific letters plays on a monitor suspended from the ceiling above; underneath, a large-scale book of additional correspondence sits splayed open on a plinth. […] (November 2022)

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Opacity and the Spill — The Photographs of Clifford Prince King, Shikeith, and Paul Mpagi Sepuya by Allison Noelle Conner
[…] Like King and Shikeith, Sepuya turns away from the photographic impulse to dissect and profit. Born and raised in Southern California, Sepuya pulls apart the mechanics of photography and the artist studio— composing his frames with smudged mirrors, velvet drapes, tripods, lighting equipment, intertwined figures, test prints, and hands pressing camera shutters. […] (November 2022)

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"The section exhibited at Vielmetter is titled “Corpus” and includes images of fetish objects — boots, a purse, a nightgown — staged like advertisements. The piece is multilayered in a way that’s typical of Kelly’s work, with photographs and texts that are personal but different in tone from her writing in “Post-Partum,” less like diaries and more like fables. The stories are displayed at the scale of bus stop advertisements, in Kelly’s handwriting. There are first-person scenes set in a nightclub and in a sauna with other women, and one featuring a dying mother. Some words are highlighted in lipstick red. (“That was really sexy for me,” Kelly said.) And despite the title, one never sees an actual female body; instead, it’s conjured constantly through signs and signifiers."

By Sophie Haigney – 11 November 2022

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"I have this theory that the absence of a modifier in and of itself is a kind of signifier of privilege. Only straight white men get to be artists. Everyone else is a gay artist or a woman artist or an artist of color or a gay woman artist of color, etc., not that it is anything to deny, but for straight white men, that signifier is absent. So it’s like that absence is in itself a kind of signifier. That’s something that plays into my work, absence as signifier." -Nash Glynn

By Ann C. Collins – October 2022

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"Corpus” explores emotions about the female experience which are usually left unspoken. Kelly is able to elevate mundane memories so they become significant moments and impressions which cease to be forgotten."

By Emily Babette – 5 October 2022

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"Shooting nudes against a black-velvet backdrop with salon-style furniture, Paul Mpagi Sepuya explores the traditions of 19th-century European and North American photography through a queer, playful lens. In the artist’s latest photographic series, “darkroom” functions as a double entendre, where his subjects are bathed in the red light of processing film while evoking clandestine encounters. He also captures them the bright light of day, producing two opposing moods in the exhibition."

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"I love the ambiguity. I love that people recognize themselves. Since 2015 I haven’t named any works after the subjects in them, but rather by the body of work or kind of work they relate to in my overall practice. So they’ll be A Portrait, Model Study, Darkroom Mirror Portrait, Dark Room Studio Portrait, and so forth. The thing about the newer Dark Room Studio, Dark Room Mirror, Dark Room Portrait and Dark Room Model Study works is that the obscuring like you mentioned is an effect of how much time it takes to take the picture. The extended exposure of the night-time works, 1 – 3 seconds necessarily blurs movement as things unfold in front of the camera. There are also works where I’ve formally set up a picture where the subject is looking at or interacting with their reflection in a mobile mirror that, because of the angle at which it’s turned to the camera, renders its surface invisible as well as blocks a view of the subject’s face."

By Adam Smith Perez – 2022 September

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"It is the mark of a truly successful artist that her work may feel forever contemporary. Corpus, restaged here at Vielmetter Los Angeles, is no less provocative than it was in 1990, when this first installation in Kelly’s larger Interim series debuted at New York’s New Museum."

By Claudia Ross – 29 September 2022

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"Roberts’ artwork exposes the implicit racism in societal standards of beauty, decorum and value for Black children, simultaneously providing insight into what it means to grow up Black in America.

“When I was growing up you couldn’t look people in the face, you had to look down, cast your eyes down,” Roberts said. “I want these kids to look you directly in your face, have a conversation with you, be strong. You’re not lesser than. That’s why all the works have that one (eye) glare straight at you.”

By Chadd Scott – 24 September 2022

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"In his recent exhibition at Vielmetter Los Angeles, “Daylight Studio / Dark Room Studio,” Sepuya presents two series of photographs that oscillate in scale, light, and technique. The Daylight Studio series depicts the mechanics of the artist’s studio, presenting the studio space as a kind of stage where images are constructed. Historically, the photographer’s “stage” has been a platform of control designed to objectify and dominate marginalized subjects. Alternatively, Sepuya’s studio is a space for play, pleasure, and empowerment where subjects have agency over their bodies and interactions. Sepuya exposes the scaffolding that divides the artist and the subject and conceals the dynamic spaces and relations that animate the studio."

By Lauren Guilford – 15 September 2022

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"Arlene Shechet expands and deepens both her “embodied, intuitive” making of objects and her masterful organization of installations in architect Steven Holl’s ‘T’ Space. Built with keen awareness of architecture’s origins in Greek ritual drama, the venue is shaped like a T and is illuminated by varied windows, doors, and skylights, as trees cast shadows on its walls and floor. In five carefully engineered new works—one installed outdoors—with new formal attention to the figure, Shechet extends her unique blend of Dionysian and Apollonian impulses."

By Hearne Pardee – September 2022

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Edgar Arceneaux's work is featured in the essay "Strange Webs" by Elizabeth Schambelan in the current issue of Artforum.

"After the United States Supreme Court struck down Roe v. Wade on June 24, 2022, approximately half the states triggered or scrambled to enact near-total bans on abortion. A day after this development, its devastation difficult to fathom, I visited Andrea Bowers’s retrospective at the Hammer Museum, where I was transfixed by her video Letters to an Army of Three as well as an accompanying artist book and wall installation (all 2005). These projects animate an archive of letters written to the Army of Three, an activist group in the Bay Area that distributed vital information about accessing safe abortion services to women and their loved ones in the decade before the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision."

By Jackson Davidow – 25 August 2022

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"Gaignard is a photographer and mixed-media artist who combines self-portraiture with immersive sculptural installations consisting of found materials like photographs, carefully chosen books, and porcelain bric-a-brac that bring the interior lives of her subjects into full view." – Colony Little

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"Spanning video, projection, objects, and paintings, The Ritual Is for All of us offers another view into Pope.L’s legendary durational practice. Though he is often linked to his “Crawl” series — public performances that found the artist dragging his body across the asphalt of the New York City streets from one location to another — Pope.L’s practice resists categorization, flitting from theater to writing to visual art with a mischievous glee. Whether he’s using a VHS camera or found objects, his work considers the slipperiness of language and time, inviting the viewer into absurdist encounters that leave us contemplating our own perspectives and social conditions."

By Allison Conner – July 2022

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"For Bowers, activism and art are inseparable. In her day-to-day life, she works with activist groups that promote environmental, immigration and trans rights, all of which feature heavily in the Hammer show. In the gallery focused on environmental activism, one miniature drawing is a self-portrait — a detailed replica of a mug shot, a token from an eco-activism-related arrest."

By Catherine Womack – 8 July 2022

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"Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s intimate portraiture flips the script bringing the behind the scenes into prominent display. The result of a performance between drop cloths, tripods and raw wooden benches in the light of day that heightens the interactions between the nude bodies of both the subject and the photographer—all are central figures in their own right."

By Janelle Zara – July 2022

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"In the nearly 25-year survey of Andrea Bowers’ art newly opened at the UCLA Hammer Museum, Harris’ unforeseen but revealing question is enshrined in a monumental drawing made of the humblest materials. Bowers’ career as an artist is embedded in socially conscious engagement with many contentious issues, including women’s bodily autonomy, immigration, ecological disaster and human rights."

By Christopher Knight

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"Enigmatic artist Pope.L works across performance, installation, and video to explore race, identity, language, and material culture. For his second solo show at Vielmetter, he has transformed the gallery into a series of sheds through which viewers must navigate. They will encounter four video works characterized by their unsettling tone, and a sculpture, I Machine, that is composed of two stacked overhead projectors and a contraption that drips liquid into a bowl, the sound of which is amplified. Also on view will be elements from “The Black Factory,” an ongoing archive since 2004 of “black objects” gathered from the public, that have been secured in compression boxes."

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"Wangechi Mutu, the Kenyan-born multidisciplinary artist best known for her clay and bronze sculptures and collage paintings, has been going to Storm King Art Center, in New York’s Hudson Valley, since she was a student at Cooper Union, and later Yale, in the 1990s. “It calls people back and back again, like a place of pilgrimage,” she says of the open-air museum less than two hours from Manhattan, speaking via Zoom from her apartment in Brooklyn — her studio is in the same brownstone, though she also keeps a studio in Nairobi. Now, having just finished installing eight large-scale bronze sculptures on Storm King’s Museum Hill, one part of the complex’s 500 acres — which are also home to pieces by Lynda Benglis, Alexander Calder and Sol LeWitt, among others — she’s come full circle."

By Shirley Ngozi Nwangwa – 3 June 2022

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"It’s difficult not to read Arlene Shechet’s vibrant mixed-media sculptures as stand-ins for the body. Many of the artist’s polychromatic forms are human in scale and even in demeanor. Take Altered State, 2020—one of the eight works featured in this exhibition at Vielmetter—an abstract assemblage of glazed ceramic, steel, and painted wood, which bears an arrangement of headlike forms in black, gold, and blue balanced atop a stocky trunk. The object seemed to be gazing down at its own image, which was reflected in a series of electroplated chrome tiles at the work’s base. Indeed, this quasi-figurative Narcissus may have been regarding its “self” in the mirror. "

By Catherine Taft – Summer 2022

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"Ellen Berkenblit’s paintings are built from the lovely gaps within and between time, space, lips, metaphors, just as painting itself has been understood of late as a productively anachronistic medium. As Amy Sillman has written of Berkenblit, “Neither representations nor simulacra, these figures are displacements, emptied presences that allow something else to pour out: grief, ruins, memories, stories from old worlds…”1 And those old worlds have old words, the stuff of chivalric legends, old photographs, crushes, and Lynchian girl groups."

By William J. Simmons – May 2022

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"It makes me uncomfortable when everything is totally out of control, but it also makes me uncomfortable when everything is completely in control. It’s the navigation between these poles that creates dynamism within my work. Certainly, there are strategies that I stick to when I’m painting. I like creating things that feel like a performance or an event on a stage."

By Pia Gottschaller – May 2022

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"In Gut Feelings the artist takes a physiological approach to trauma and othering while drawing on her experiences of acclimating to life in Sweden as a refugee from Iraq during the Gulf War. Kahraman uses exposed, knotted intestines as a visual metaphor for trauma to explore the process of coping with the impacts of distressing events as she highlights the inalienable connection between mind and body. The show also considers links between neuroscience, the microbiome and how the body carries trauma through the artist’s work with bacteria."

By Salena Barry – May 2022

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"One of the strangest and most compelling works in the show is a two-channel video by New York-based, Jamaican artist Dave McKenzie. Listed Under Accessories (2022) shows the artist entangled in an ambiguous but earnest struggle with curious objects. For several minutes, McKenzie performs a seemingly improvised choreography with a large sheet of glass. At first, he’s resting the rectangle on his foot and scooting around the room; later, he balances it on the back of his head and shoulders, flexing his neck to keep it level. The rigidity of the glass forces his Black body to adapt in order to handle the material safely. He’s going through something, and we feel it with him even if the parameters of his struggle are never fully explained."

By Peter Brock

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"Nine of Roberts’ collage-and-pencil works on canvas at Art + Practice, plus nine from a suite of 27 Warhol-style silk-screen heads, elaborate the theme, introducing girls and kids in groups. (In a nice touch, the silk screens are hung low on the wall — kid-height.) Roberts places her figures off-center against blank white fields, her unerring design sense yielding the savvy effect of a fashion shoot. Given a larger absence of Black faces in commercial culture, these kids insert themselves — camera-ready."

By Christopher Knight – 11 May 2022

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"As an installation, I’m is about empowerment. The works cry out: Look at me. I’m a person. I’m here. I’m important. In this exhibition, Roberts blends faces of children and grownups to suggest the trajectory toward adulthood and the fact that in today’s violent and racist world, they grow up too fast, if they get to grow up at all.'

By Jody Zellen – May 2022

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"Just inside the entrance, the visitor is greeted by Bright Sun Cloud (2021) offset on a large floor plinth. Rising in piled chunks of wood and ceramic, these forms seem to spread out in a big yellow/green embrace. Revealing itself only after a 360° perusal, the forms are masked from one side to the next and shifts in color provide new readings from one view to the next. The soft surface is replete with both cracks and textures and the only element less heated in the ensemble is the steel plate below which strikes a more plaintive, almost whimsical note. Along with the scalar shifts, it’s impossible to survey the entirety of the work, making viewing a literal discovery."

By John David O'Brien – May 10, 2022

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"We now have to defend our beauty and the way we dress. So I wanted to show the vulnerability of young children, especially boys, when that toxic masculinity appears, as early as the third grade. Most of the definitions that apply to Black boys and Black girls are very negative and not uplifting. And that’s why most of my images are floating. I’m lifting them up. I’m not grounding them—they’re moving. And that’s what I’m hoping that my art does.” – Deborah Roberts

By Emil Wilbekin – 29 April 2022

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"Her bent toward nostalgic ephemera is coupled with an insatiable curiosity to mine personal and collective histories. Gaignard’s work rests uncomfortably at the intersections of portraiture, history and recent calls for justice. She masterfully employs found objects that signify. She appropriates misrepresentations—the commoditized stereotypes that historically have been used to humiliate Black people and presents them in active stances, ignited with a renewed agency."

By Angela N. Carroll – 22 April 2022

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"Throughout her career, Genevieve Gaignard has sought to interrogate and protest the racial violence that plagues America through her art. In her current solo exhibition with Vielmetter Los Angeles (her second with the gallery), Gaignard harkens back throughout American history and the racial violence at the forefront, intertwined with analysis of and commentary on the American psyche in its inseparability from this violent trajectory. 

Strange Fruit, its title borrowed from the iconic Billie Holiday song, is a collection of pieces which agitate against the historical and modern-day lynching of Black Americans. An aggregate of provocative pieces, Strange Fruit aims to disrupt: to amplify alternative narratives of racial violence and white supremacy.

Flaunt spoke with Gaignard about the exhibition and her practice and intentionality behind the works therein."

By Madeleine Schulz

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"One of the rare exceptions was Vielmetter’s pairing of My Barbarian’s haunting, literary masks — a couple of which adorn the ornamental specter Standelabra 4 (Cassandra as Judith) — with sweeping new erotic photographs by Paul Mpagi Sepuya. Taken together, these works suggest an approach to gender, race, and sex as open questions rather than the fixed, overdetermined testimonies espoused by most figurative works at the fair. The performance group My Barbarian is fresh off a recent survey at the Whitney."

By Matt Morris – April 2022

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"Adopted from Billy Holiday’s haunting song of the same name, Strange Fruit highlights that the inextricable nature of America and violence towards its own black citizens must be examined. The work emerges from a time of great historical movements in America and around the world calling for racial justice, citizens acting on peaceful protests, and violent desperations. Paradoxically, Gaignard’s photographs are tantalizing and dream-like, embodying a stunning irony as the artist heavily critiques the American Dream. In Off With Their Heads: The Gallant South (2022), Gaignard embodies Southern-Gothic elements, illuminating the grotesque features of the American-South through a farcical glamorous exterior. In the image, Gaignard herself poses in an antiquated gown before a grandiose yet old and derelict mansion, the white paint fading to brown and pillars crumbling before unkempt plants. "

By April-Rose Desalegn – April 2022

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"Seeing a video made by the artists Mary Reid Kelley and Patrick Kelley for the first time can feel like encountering a newly invented language. How best to take it in? Should you sit? Stand? Close your eyes and listen? Take notes? In each of their black-and-white videos, usually about ten minutes long, a handful of characters, most of them acted by Mary, tell a story in rhyming verse full of off-kilter wordplay, double entendres, and semantic switcheroos. The density of the puns and the breakneck pace of their delivery, combined with the visual cacophony of the set design, might compel you to watch it on loop."

By Elvia Wilk – 7 April 2022

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"The first booth you see upon entering Expo Chicago is Vielmetter’s presentation of a series of immaculate face masks aligned perfectly on a wall. Don’t worry—they have nothing to do with Covid. Instead, it likely has to do with Commedia dell’arte given their distinctive features: a rough white face adorned with a messy black wig holds a tray filled with ornamented vases in one hand and another version of its face in the other. To make this dramatic sculpture, titled Standelabra IV Cassandra as Judith, My Barbarian (a trio formed by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon, and Alexandro Segade) pulled from their archive objects and materials used in former performances.  The collective’s 20th-anniversary show, which ended last February at the Whitney Museum, is currently in transit to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles."

By Sarah Belmont – 8 April 2022

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"After a year’s Covid delay, the latest Whitney Biennial has pulled into town, and it’s a welcome sight. Other recent editions — this is the 80th such roundup — have tended to be buzzy, jumpy, youthquake affairs. This one, even with many young artists among its 60-plus participants, most represented by brand-new, lockdown-made work, doesn’t read that way. It’s a notably somber, adult-thinking show, one freighted with three years of soul-rattling history marked by social divisiveness, racist violence and relentless mortality…..

Performance merges with abstract sculpture in a video by the estimable Dave McKenzie, whom we see improvising balletic encounters with stray objects in his studio, where he seems to have spent a good deal of lockdown time."

By Holland Cotter – 31 March 2022

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"Gaignard’s amalgam of collage, installation, sculpture, and self-portraiture featured in the show began to take shape as the artist, who started making waves in the art world in 2013, eyed materials in her L.A. studio, particularly mammy and Royal Doulton figurines. When looking at the figurines, Gaignard remembers thinking, “‘I wish I had a bunch of these.’” So, she requested a fabricator reproduce 100 mammy statuettes. "When I saw them, all lined up, I was like, ‘Damn, they’re an army.’” Her new piece, “The American Dream is a Pyramid Scheme,” features 81 custom, headless figurines on tiers. “Someone could read it as dismembering, but the figurines weren’t something we Black people made for ourselves,” she says. “This was white people making a glorified image of what it was to serve them. I felt she was stronger without her head. Removing her head was a way to take her story beyond servant and focus on her stance, what she’s conquered, and what Black people continue to conquer.”

By Jessica Herndon – 1 April 2022

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"An installation of tightly staggered mirrors on vintage wallpaper titled Do You Only Want to See What You Believe? brings to mind W. E. B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness in their fragmented reflections. The mirrors summon Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, which tells the story of a Black girl who spends long hours looking in the mirror. Clouded by racist ideals, the girl struggles to recognize her own Black beauty. The mirrors also prompt the viewer to look at themselves—to turn inwards and ask, Do you only want to see what you believe? Viewers are encouraged to examine their own identities, values, and potential complicity. By turning to the past, Gaignard reminds us that America is still sick—with blood on the leaves and blood at the root. "

By Lauren Guilford – 31 March 2022

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"Kahraman’s paintings are obsessed with the gaze — ours as viewers, but also how her subjects, trapped in vulnerable, submissive positions, return the look. Art has a way of fighting back, of implicating the viewer in the drama, these images seem to say. Kahraman used to describe her sense of dislocation and trauma through violent images: women in chains or hung from a tree. That seems to have given way to a quieter sense of horror. Her women stare back, their expressions eerie and accusatory."

By En Liang Khong – March 11 2022

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"In 2009, sensitive to the ways that Black girls are under particular duress in American culture, the Austin-based artist Deborah Roberts began creating intricate collages of innocence and joy — “very Black Norman Rockwell,” as she described them in a recent interview. When she decided to pursue an M.F.A. in 2014 at age 48, hoping to discover ways to move her work forward, she was struck by how little research there was to draw upon to understand the lives of Black girls and the challenges they faced. “There was scholarship on Black women,” she explained, “but not on how we become Black women.”

Six years later, a lot has changed. Roberts’s own career has exploded: Her mixed-media of found photographs on paper and canvas have been lately acquired by MoMA, the Whitney, and the Guggenheim, purchased by celebrity collectors including the Carters (Beyoncé and Jay-Z) and Spike Lee, and even featured in a recent episode of “And Just Like That…,” the “Sex and the City” reboot.

Meanwhile, the pressures that Black girls face every day — often stereotyped to be more adult, and less innocent, at a far younger age than their white counterparts, with the result that they are often sexualized earlier; overpoliced by schools and law enforcement; and held to white beauty standards at great cost to their self-esteem, for example — are being increasingly brought to light by activists, educators and researchers."

By Aruna D'Souza – 24 February 2022

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"In the past 15 years she has used her painted women to investigate the refugee condition from often surprising angles. The figures have become contortionists; canvases have been sliced up and rewoven into abstract patterns, in an allegory of the fragmented nature of memory, culture and trauma. A recent Covid-centric series interrogated the martial language of immunology, in which the human fortress is seen to be “invaded” or “colonised” by foreign bodies."

By Skye Sherwin – 21 February 2022

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"She always cut through the bullshit. One time, I made this video and Barbara saw it and said: “Your work is usually so coherent, but I just don’t understand what’s going on here.” I loved the way she just put it out there. She didn’t soften anything that didn’t need to be softened. Some of the best advice that she offered me was to keep things simple. I think she saw this as one of my strengths and really encouraged me to keep in touch with a pared-down and concise language, which is something that I continue to do. There were some professors whose opinions I could discount because they didn’t necessarily understand what I was working on, but I really trusted Barbara’s opinion. I haven’t seen her that often since I graduated but, when I do run into her at a social event, she’s always so supportive. To me, she will always be a punk-rock legend."

By Math Bass and Chloe Stead – 14 February 2022

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"In the photography of Paul Mpagi Sepuya, the nude body, which is its frequent subject, isn’t the most intimate part of the composition; rather, it’s the glimpse we get into the photographer’s studio: bare intermingling limbs reflected in mirrors or jutting out of sheets; equipment strewn on the floor. In his self-portraits, smudged traces of bodies are visible on the surface of the mirror, around which hang torn-up pieces of drafting paper and other art-making detritus. All of this makes it seem like the studio isn’t ready for our presence; we’d be voyeurs if it weren’t for the artist’s careful compositions."

By Marko Gluhaich – 14 February 2022

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"At this solo booth, Samuel Levi Jones is presenting a powerful new series of mixed-media works in which the covers and pages of Indiana history and law books are juxtaposed in various compositions. These works are eye-catching, no doubt in part because the artist has pulped and dyed his books, lending them a material quality. Though at first glance these abstractions can seem simple, Jones is looking to contend with the many ways that recorded history can systemically perpetuate inequities."

By Maximiliano Duron – 18 February 2022

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"Gaignard’s chameleon quality, her ability to manipulate herself and play with perception through character-driven portraiture has become the core of this phase of her artistic practice. The depictions of various western archetypes create an internal dialogue within the viewer, “How do you know she’s old?” “How can you tell she’s rich?” “What says she’s black?” Gaignard challenges the viewer. What associations do we make and why? Do those associations connote something positive or negative? The demand for introspection begs the viewer to look at how they see themselves and how they perceive others. What biases, implicit or otherwise are at work within each of us? With Gaignard’s work, everyone is on the hook to take a deeper look at each other and to look deep within. "

By Jewels Dodson – 11 February 2022

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For the first time in 10 years, Ziperstein also has her own fine-art studio, where she spent much of last fall prepping for her current solo show at the Vielmetter gallery. To realize the hulking sculptures, she carved intricate patterns inspired by Soviet textiles into the clay, firing and glazing them, paint-by- numbers style. Like many of the brutalist buildings she has long referenced, the Cold War–era textiles were commissioned by the government. “They’re propaganda,” she explains. “I’m interested in thinking about our historical past and how it talks about our current state.” 

By Hannah Martin – February 2022

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"For the last few years, during the course of the pandemic, Bleckner has kept his time and movement sequestered at his studio in the Hamptons. That’s where he worked on his most recent show, Sehnshuct, which recently opened to much fanfare at Vielmetter Gallery in downtown Los Angeles. It’s  Bleckner’s first solo show in L.A. in more than a quarter-century and revisits some of the themes of loss and anxiety that pervaded his early work."

By Michael Slenske – 11 February 2022

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"The dark black backgrounds of the three paintings from 2021, entitled After 51 Years (I), (II) and (III), offer a stark contrast to the saturated and brightly painted flower imagery in the foreground. Similar to his famous Birds Falling of 1995, the flower imagery on the painted canvas has been blurred by dragging the paint strokes while they were still wet. This distortion of imagery make the flowers seem like they are in motion, immediately bringing forth a contemplation of the ephemeral."

By Emily Babette – 10 February 2022

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"At the Greenhouse, an annex in Vielmetter Los Angeles’ parking lot, Nicole Eisenman’s alarming plaster sculpture of a big, burly man with a blank face smeared in silver rides on the back of another beefy guy down on all fours, his hands and feet sullied in grime. The pointedly titled “Man at the Center of Men,” shown at the 2019 Whitney Biennial, is capped off by a pair of mirrored trash-can lids, held up as crashing cymbals with which the preening rider regards himself.

In a brilliant twist, spotlights reflecting off the mirrors cast the crude rider’s profile in shadow overhead on the ceiling, the dark silhouette framed by a luminous halo. Eisenman deftly topples the grandiose tradition of man-on-a-horse monuments, her “Man at the Center of Men” emerging as more a dull brute astride a subservient fellow donkey than a triumphal leader.

The sculpture resonates, dating from deep in the darkest days of the Trump administration, just before colossal White House incompetence sent deadly disease rocketing through society."

By Christopher Knight – 3 February 2022

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"The artwork on the cover was created by mixed media artist Deborah Roberts, whose work grapples with notions of race, beauty, and otherness. Initially, Roberts says she attempted to create a work that would bring together all the faces of Black people who have been victims of police brutality. “I started cutting up faces and merging them together, but everyone needed their own space to exist,” she says. In producing the cover image, Roberts used a now-iconic photograph of Martin. “I wanted to do something that hadn’t already been done for him,” she says. “It’s been used for him and against him. I kind of wanted to take that away.”

Ultimately, Roberts says she hopes people will look at this cover and understand there’s still work left to be done. She wants people to ask themselves how we’re going to make space for children to be children for their entire childhood, and to remember that people can be many things at once. “We have to start seeing people as full people,” she says."

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"The Shear segment of “Ways of Seeing” presented a hard act to follow. and in November the sculptor Arlene Shechet opted for an enchanting installation for “Take Two." She painted the lower half of the galleries’ walls with bands of pale brown and gray, hung the drawings at different heights and added benches of her own design whose alternately rounded and right-angled edges seemed to comment on the nature of line.

Shechet took care that her selections were linked, one piece to the next, by form or subject, creating an almost continuous chain."

By Roberta Smith – 20 January 2022

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