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Dec 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
DORÉNAVANT, TOUT SERA COMME D’HABITUDE. (From now on, everything will be as usual.) Printed in bold, all-caps lettering, this sibylline slogan appears in an artwork by Jacques Villeglé (1926–2022) for “The French Flâneur,” an exhibition of his work at Fleiss-Vallois. The wry joke points to an animating contradiction in the artist’s influential practice of décollage—one I had neither understood nor anticipated until seeing this show.
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Nov 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
In this exhibition at Roberts Projects, Wendy Red Star set the display systems of the fine-arts gallery against those of the ethnographic institutions. She staged this divide in the main room, bifurcating it between two modes of display: paintings on the walls and vitrines in the center. The latter contained twelve bishkisché, or “backpacks for dogs to carry meat or grain,” to use the English translation of the Apsálooke word.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel |Rebekah Rutkoff |Oskar Oprey |DiaryThe HEAT
On Emily in ParisEMILY STANDS in a line of supplicants. Her marketing team is wooing a potential client, fashion designer Pierre, each of her colleagues more obsequious than the last. As she begins to sputter inanities, she draws his ornithoid scowl. His eyes dart about until they fall upon her bag charm, a gilded Eiffel Tower. “RINGARDE,” he shouts in dismay. Translation: “He called you a basic bitch.”Now Emily storms Pierre’s private box at the Palais Garnier and begins to soliloquize.
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Oct 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
I tend to think of Photorealism as an -ism like any other. It had its moment (the late 1960s), its question (how to paint after Pop), and its heroes (e.g., Chuck Close). Against this assumption, Dike Blair treats it as something closer to a medium, so that, in principle, there could be as many types of Photorealism as there are photographic styles. Inspired by Edward Hopper’s 1939 canvas New York Movie, this exhibition, titled “Matinee,” solicits obvious comparisons with cinematography.
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Sep 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
The first thing I noticed was how empty the space was: Tiffany Sia’s exhibition at Maxwell Graham had only three works, all videos, all from 2024. The first of these, installed closest to the entrance, played on a surtitle LED board, roughly three by ten inches; the second, at the bottom of the staircase, on a tri-channel rack mount about three by nineteen inches; the third, on a modest CRT monitor at the end of the gallery space.
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Jun 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
This show at Jack Shainman featured photographs related to Gordon Parks: Born Black, A Personal Report on the Decade of Black Revolt, 1960–1970, a book first released in 1971 and republished this year. Because Parks (1912–2006) penned the volume’s text, he spoke for himself on its principal theme: Black Americans at a revolutionary moment. The displayed works shared a core mystery: How can artworks visualize people as both distinct individuals and social subjects?
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel |Rachel Wetzler |Jan Tumlir |Clifford Owens
Impressionism’s contested legacyI WAS ONCE AT THE YALE CLUB, visiting my childhood best friend, who has since become a MAGA podcast host. As was his custom, he ordered us some martinis and led me to a tufted-leather couch. Seated beneath a smiling portrait of George W. Bush, he noticed the copy of Robert L. Herbert’s 1988 book Impressionism emerging from my bookbag. “Impressionism!” he exclaimed. “The last real art.”His comment reflects a larger worldview, one with defined aesthetic commitments.
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Apr 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
It matters that Champion Métadier began her career as a painter, and that she did so at a time when that medium was in crisis. That fact gives necessary context for her exhibition at Ceysson & Bénétière, where she exhibited not paintings but single-edition prints of images made with Photoshop Elements. For many young artists in post-1968 France, painting was prohibited. It was, after all, the form par excellence of bourgeois subjectivity, apparently reifying the idea of unique personal experience.
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Mar 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
Why do some “Gemini” paintings succeed where others fail? As I study a given example from Larry Zox’s 1967–69 series of concave polygons, I feel that I know when one is working, but not necessarily why. It would satisfy no one to shrug, “I just like it,” or to cite some personal preference for a particular color combination. To apply standards enumerated in advance or derived from encounters with other artists’ work would also be misguided.
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Feb 1, 2024 | 
artforum.com | Harmon Siegel
In Caroline Kent’s latest exhibition, “This Space for Correspondence,” the artist displayed her abstract paintings alongside a group of relief-like works. Built directly into the walls and colored the same shade of white, these geometric protrusions and recessed hollows unsettled her graphic compositions, prompting the viewer to oscillate between seeing her paintings as individual works of art and as embellishments of the interior space.
