-
Jan 14, 2025 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
Instead of seeing a variety of shows, what if you kept revisiting one, over and over, until you couldn’t bear anymore? How many times do you typically visit a given exhibition? For people who aren’t critics, the answer is probably ‘once’. For those who are, it’s maybe twice or thereabouts, unless the show is uncommonly big. Then there’s looking: how long, how close? The late critic Dave Hickey reckoned you should be able to spend as long in an exhibition as it took to get there.
-
Dec 2, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
The 2024 edition, ‘Crossing the Water’, is at once well intentioned and adrift in a sea of vague metaphorThe theme of the latest Lyon Biennale sounds like what you’d get if you typed ‘safe biennale theme 2024’ into ChatGPT.
-
Nov 5, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
The Thai artist’s pop-inflected collage-paintings are underpinned as much by the adaptability of the immigrant mindset as they are globalised modernist aestheticsUdomsak Krisanamis’s origin story is well rehearsed by now, but since it continues to inflect his art, let’s spell it out again. In 1991, when the Thai artist arrived at the Art Institute of Chicago in his mid-twenties, after studying in his home city of Bangkok, he barely spoke a word of English.
-
Oct 31, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
In Some Bright Morning at Fridericianum, Kassel, the artist’s lyrical metal works are at once ethereal and laced with undercurrents of racial violenceIn 1941, F. Scott Fitzgerald famously wrote that there are no second acts in American lives; Melvin Edwards was four then, he’s now eighty-seven and his second act is a decade deep. In 1970, after five years of showing publicly, the Houston-born artist was the first African-American sculptor to have a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum.
-
Oct 24, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
From 2018: As an art critic, Indiana was big-brained and bitchy, literary and worldlyGary Indiana isn’t an art critic any more, hasn’t been one for decades.
-
Oct 11, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
100 years on from the Surrealist Manifesto, the movement risks becoming little more than a populist attraction filled with big personalities, schisms and wacky moustachesThis month marks exactly a century since the birth of Surrealism, if we date the movement to the publication of the First Surrealist Manifesto. Or rather, Manifestoes, since there were two rival factions of surrealists back in 1924 and the first defining screed was published on 1 October by French-German poet Yvan Goll.
-
Oct 1, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Sylvia Plath |Martin Herbert
A critic questions framing the American as an artist for all timesMike Kelley’s career can be divided, in retrospect, into three sections: the part most people didn’t understand or even know about (the late 1970s through to the mid-80s), the part where the work tightened up and yet got misread (beginning during the late 80s) and the American artist’s reaction to these earlier periods, which led to everything that came after (from the mid-1990s to 2012, the year he died).
-
Sep 30, 2024 | 
apollo-magazine.com | Martin Herbert
Installation view of Float (2019) and Niagara (2005) in 'Mark Bradford. Keep Walking' at Hamburger Bahnhof, 2024. Photo: Jacopo La Forgia; © Nationalgalerie – Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; courtesy Mark Bradford/Hauser & Wirth; © the artist
-
Aug 21, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
What does sunspot activity have to do with our political tides? Comrade Sun at Kunsthalle Wien tries to align our social world with an astral oneThe first thing you see in this elliptically titled 14-artist exhibition is not art. It’s a wall-filling graph that correlates sunspot activity, which peaks and dips in an approximately 11-year rhythm, with events in modern history since the French Revolution. The Europe-wide revolutions in 1848? Lots of sunspots then.
-
Jul 16, 2024 | 
artreview.com | Martin Herbert
As Give Me Paradox or Give Me Death at Museum Ludwig, Cologne demonstrates, Horn’s art has always had an inexorable qualityOne advantage of a practice that emphasises the instability of everything – from individual identity to the world’s weather – is that even your retrospectives, in momentarily unmooring familiar works through recombining them, can function as conceptual acts.
