All Reviews

102 Reviews

81 to 90 of 102 Go to Page ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
  • 1.0 star rating
    10/15/2012

    There are people out there who have very little intellectual curiosity but still like to feel smart and Unix is a gallery that caters to them. I went there during the Miami Art Walk and there was a wax sculpture of Damien Hirst shooting himself in the head (displayed in a glass case, to make it look extra precious and valuable) and I thought, This is exactly the kind of thing that would appeal to a rich jerk who fancies himself edgy and savvy about art but actually doesn't know a thing about it. There was also a series of obnoxiously arty, large-format pornographic photos. Picture early Cindy Sherman, but with big naked tits and shaved vaginas. Garbage!

  • 174 Nw 23rd St
    Miami, FL 33127
    3.0 star rating
    10/15/2012

    This is a good gallery, for Miami. The front room had some elegant furniture pieces with glass and mirror tops resting on rounded zigzag legs. The smaller back room had a group show of works on paper and small objects that included pieces from the furniture designer as well as like-minded artists. Separating the two shows kept the works in the back from looking like props in an interior-design magazine shoot, which was a wise move.

  • 3.0 star rating
    10/15/2012

    This is a good space. I went during the Art Walk and they had a Quisqueya Henriquez show will collages and prints: op-art lenticular effects, shimmery pixelated screen shots, digital renders of architectural fragments, sticky Rorschach-test paintings laid on top of some of the prints. She is taking some interesting ideas that other artists have explored in greater depth and putting them together in her own way. This isn't incredibly exciting but, honestly, that's what most art is and at least Quisqueya Henriquez has a nose for what's relevant.

    Tip: Don't even look at the press releases. The pretention is over-the-top. You will gag.

  • 2.0 star rating
    10/15/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    I went to Spinello Projects on opening night of Manny Prieres's exhibition: graphite drawings on black paper of covers of banned books, from the Bible to Salman Rushdie and Daddy's New Roommate. These were small, not-too-expensive works that look good in any minimal apartment and have an air of bookish importance that turns them into easy conversation-starters. The show was obviously calculated to sell by looking slick while capitalizing on cultural conflicts--in very poor taste, if you ask me. It got worse on the second floor, where in addition to the book covers there were slogans drawn in the same technique, including "Work will set you free," from the gates at Auschwitz. Gross. It's a cool space though.

  • Hermanstr. 16
    12049 Berlin
    Germany
    4.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    Times is a bar that is technically a kunstverein. It always has one work of art hanging over the bar. I have been to Times quite a few times. I really liked a work they showed by Harm van den Dorpel, a print that looked like a modernist abstract collage from a hundred years ago but was composed of some blank digital files, semi-randomly arranged. Another piece I saw was by Simon Denny. He took the first bill that the bar earned (five euros or something) that had been pinned over the working area and moved it to the art-display place. Or did he put up a different bill, to double the original? I can't remember. Either way, it seemed like a cop-out. But in the end it doesn't really matter, because hanging artworks at the bar is less about making exhibitions than it is about fostering a community of regulars, a way of keeping artists and their friends coming back to Times. And it's too dark to get a very good look anyway.

    The events that Times hosts are probably more interesting as artworks than the objects that hang over the bar. This summer there was a pole-dancing contest where performance artists competed, and a show of artworks that were painted on a model's nails. She was just chilling at the bar until you asked to see the show and then she'd put her fingers under the light. These days there are a lot of museums that are connecting performance art to parties. This keeps up with trends in "time-based" art, and it's also a way of getting people to visit the museum repeatedly and spend their money there. I don't necessarily have a problem with this, but a lot of times when I'm at a museum I'm not really in the mood to be drinking and dancing. It just feels weird! So I'm glad there is a place like Times where this connection can be made without feeling forced. I would give Times five stars but it gets really smoky inside. Sorry to be the prudish American but I just don't like super smoky bars.

  • 2.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    I had heard a lot about The Future Gallery before I came to Berlin and was excited to visit it. I'm sorry to say that I was disappointed. Both of the exhibitions I saw there were weak. Jennifer Chan's exhibition had a jumble of works that looked like they were based on trendy motifs I had seen elsewhere--plants, a pool of water, a printed list of unused URLs--but I couldn't figure out why these motifs had been brought in here. The most interesting part was the video, about two dudes Skyping and then ordering a pizza. It was hard to tell what they were saying but I guess the sound was fuzzy on purpose and I was OK with that. The "climax," so to speak, featured a guy in a pizza-print shirt jerking off and ejaculating on the shirt. You don't see a lot of penises in video art, especially not in such long explicit shots. Watching it was uncomfortable (and not just because it was a mediocre penis, lol) so if Jennifer Chan was trying to disrupt the male gaze or whatever I would have to say that she succeeded. More importantly, I liked the connections between that part of the video and the homosocial intimacy of the two guys Skyping and sharing pizza, and how it suggested ideas about contemporary masculinity, youth culture, and internet culture.

    At least Jennifer Chan's exhibition was trying to communicate something and engage ideas. The second show I saw at Future Gallery was intellectually empty. There were some elaborately tie-dyed textiles and glass fixtures that looked like they came straight from Home Depot--gestures about materiality and transparency that (as was the case with Jennifer Chan's non-video works) seemed familiar from elsewhere but were not fully conceptualized or convincingly executed here. At the opening the gallery was serving a Turkish gum that was flavorless--you just chewed and chewed and it didn't release any taste. This seemed like a bad choice on Future Gallery's because it was too easy to take the refreshments as an unflattering commentary on the work.

    Maybe I just hit a couple of duds. I think it's great that The Future Gallery is committed to working with artists who don't have much of an exhibition history and lets them try out new things. But I feel like there are so many young artists in Berlin and elsewhere that it could do better. Perhaps developing more group shows would be a good idea, because those can cover up weaknesses that solo shows expose.

  • 4.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    Very interesting gallery. Over the summer it featured a program called Films & Windows, where every few weeks it showed an artist's video(s) inside the gallery and another artist's sculptures or installation in the big vitrine that faces the sidewalk. I have been here a few times to check out what Mathew was showing as part of this program. The first time I went I really liked the window pieces, by Kerstin Braetsch (sp?), but I absolutely hated the video inside. It was an interview with an American woman, an artist apparently, who was talking about Berlin and how it had changed over the last decade. She was rehashing every possible cliche about gentrification, talking about how things were better when she was younger with zero self-awareness of her own role in the gentrification process. And she spoke with that dippy Californian intonation pattern that I can't stand listening to. So after about three minutes I went outside to look at the sculptures some more.

    When I returned the situation was reversed, in that I wasn't crazy about the window installation (by Taslima Ahmed, there were lots of pictures of cows, like in the tunnels of the trains you take to get around the Zurich airport) but I enjoyed the videos. They were made by the artist Ken Okiishi around the year 2000, when he was a student at Cooper Union in New York. They weren't amazing or anything but very good for undergraduate work, and gave an unpolished look not only at the New York cityscape of ten years ago but also the media environment (internet and movies) of the time. As I understood it, the theme of the Films & Windows series was gentrification, and it was approached in subtle ways. Showing this older work was one of them.  Using the storefront as a gallery space was another.  

    I should note that on my second trip to Mathew I talked to some people about the video I had seen on my previous visit and I learned that the Californian woman had in fact been an actress, reading a script that was deliberately written to sound extremely irritating. It fooled me!! I guess that makes it more interesting as an artwork but I still hate it.

  • 3.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    Listed in My Firsts!

    I saw a summer group show here and it was basically the ideal summer group show: very smartly put together with works in all sorts of mediums. One or maybe two works were "outsider-ish" (i.e. hard to sell), and all of them could be related to a single keyword (in this case, PLANTS) that has a loose relationship to a broader issue (ecology) and also a buzzy philosophical trend (object-oriented ontology). Shows like this are great if you are looking for stuff to buy but otherwise they don't bring a lot of insight into the work. Overall I had an average gallery experience here, not very exciting but not bad either.

  • 5.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    Isabella Czarnowska is a fancy gallery in an upscale part of Berlin, among some office buildings and in walking distance of the main tourist attractions. I saw an exhibition there of works by two artists, Paul Thek and Luc Tuymans.  It seemed like a strange pairing because they are from different generations and work in very different mediums (Thek does more sculpture with resin and plastic, Tuymans is a very good painter). But the exhibition helped me see things about each artist's work that I hadn't really seen before--things about surfaces, materials, and bodies that are too complicated to get into here.

  • 4.0 star rating
    7/31/2012
    First to Review
    Listed in My Firsts!

    The first time I walked into Galerie Suvi Lehtinen I was like "... What?" There was a video installation, which was not surprise in itself, but the sequences of clips on all the channels were from thirty-year-old Hollywood movies, and it had the kind of soundtrack and female voiceover you'd hear on an insurance commercial. There were bursting fireworks and swelling music. What sort of gallery was Suvi Lehtinen, I wondered, to show such kitschy stuff? But it got to me emotionally, because even when they are all cut up Hollywood movies always make me have feelings. I just can't help it! So I kept watching, and the installation looped back to the beginning.  There was an audio track (added to seem like diegetic sound but it wasn't in the originals) with reporters on the TV and radio talking about the AIDS crisis. That's when I understood that Allese Cohen (the artist) was grounding the time when the movies were made in political history, and using the movies to communicate the history of the AIDS crisis with Hollywood's techniques of manufacturing emotion instead of the usual didactic, agitprop way. It was very smart, like contemporary art usually is, and very moving, which contemporary art usually is not. I'm glad Galerie Suvi Lehtinen showed this work.

    The only problem with this gallery was that the press release said the installation included a fragrance developed by the artist in collaboration with the perfumer. It seems like "smell art" is becoming popular now and that's cool. The problem with Allese Cohen's smell art was that I only learned about it from reading the press release. I didn't notice it when I was there. If you're going to show smell art it has to be bold! So minus one star for faintness of scent.

81 to 90 of 102 Go to Page ... 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

"it's funny because it's true"

Review votes:
345 Useful, 242 Funny, and 223 Cool

Compliments
2
3
3
9
1
4
11
5
Location

JACKSON HEIGHTS, NY

Yelping Since

February 2012

Things I Love

art

Flag this profile