Mike Nelson at the Tate Britain

Mike Nelson’s The Asset Strippers reminds us that art that communicates something about the time it was created has a sudden greatness that quickens our sense of being alive. The first thing to strike you at this exhibition as you observe the remnants and ghosts of the machine age, of [...]

Néle Azevedo’s “Minimum Monument”

John K. Grande—Néle, so great to have finally met you here in Burlington, Vermont, where you enacted one of your short-lived yet phenomenal Minimum Monument events. The “collective” of ice figures disappeared within forty-five minutes, but as an expression of universal complicity in today’s ecological crisis it’s a powerful metaphor. It must have been quite [...]

“Sowers”: Maria Rebecca Ballestra & Lino and Elia Barone

Culture is economy. Culture is ecology. Today, nature and human culture intertwine at every level. To look to the future, design, production, development, and virtually all types of human activity must engage in a dialogue on the selection, use, and management of resources. Economists, like artists, can use the world’s natural capital creatively and [...]

“Small Between the Stars, Large Against the Sky”: Manif d’art 9–The Québec City Biennial

The title of this year’s Manif d’art, taken from Leonard Cohen’s song “Stories of the Street,” expresses so much so simply: this wonderful Quebec City art event is a beacon that shines in the night—and in the light of day, too. The forty artists in the biennial, curated by Jonathan Watkins of Ikon [...]

André Du Bois
“Les Attracteurs”: An Homage to the Difference

André Du Bois’s Les Attracteurs – parcours interactif involves a radical realignment of what public art is or can be. The sculptures that form part of the ensemble are enigmatic, prescient, and have the insignia of an artist whose engagement with nature is the point of departure for a dialogue on culture. [...]

“Anthropocene: The Great Acceleration”
Edward Burtynsky, Jennifer Baichwal, and Nicholas de Pencier

Edward Burtynsky, one of the world’s most timely photographers, has achieved an aesthetic and a perspective that give us a feel for how the built environment connects to nature and to the human footprint on Earth. The spectrum is spectacular, and the great theatre of Earth becomes the canvas. With [...]

Michael Rakowitz: “The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist”

Unveiled in March 2018 by the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, Iraqi-American artist Michael Rakowitz’s Fourth Plinth commission The Invisible Enemy Should Not Exist is the twelfth in an ongoing series that includes works by Antony Gormley, Bill Woodrow, David Shrigley, Katharina Fritsch, Hans Haacke, Yinka Shonibare, and Marc Quinn, among others. [...]

Rufino Tamayo
A Solitary Mexican Modernist

Of the same generation as the more overtly political Mexican muralists David Alfaro Siqueiros, Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo remains less well known than those compatriots. As curator of Rufino Tamayo: A Solitary Mexican Modernist, Marisol Argüelles makes clear, the Zapotec painter was not a Communist party conformist, so he remained [...]

Sebastião Salgado. Homage to Planet Earth

For his first ever exhibition at Sundaram Tagore Gallery in New York, Sebastião Salgado presents some forty of his photographs. They span many periods of his career and include Genesis, Workers, and Migrations. Many are portraits of people in the land, while others present the majesty and scale of the [...]

Vanishing Ice

Hats off to Barbara Matilsky for generating a show that brings into focus the context and history of art as it relates to climate change. And what range of imagery has been brought together of alpine serenity, of sailing ships caught in the arctic ice, of caribou herds seen from [...]

Louise Bourgeois. “Suspension”

Suspension has long been a part of the language of Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture. As she says, “Horizontality is a desire to give up, to sleep. Verticality is an attempt to escape. Hanging and floating are states of ambivalence.” There are no pedestals here, and it’s all upside down. Umbilical cords [...]

Charles Edenshaw and the Haida tradition

When the renowned Haida carver Charles Edenshaw received silver coins from colonial traders back in the 19th century, he would hammer them back into art, as silver bracelets and spoons. He gave them new forms, reinvented and reinterpreted them. Metal came to life and told a story. As a metaphor for [...]

Roy Lerner. Overtures and Bebop

Eternity is a brief instant when it comes to Roy Lerner’s art. Each and every painting is a journey. Exclaim!, Roy Lerner’s paintings seem to say. The gesture extends, expands with a neo-Baroque style. Lerner engages his medium, builds thick impasto surfaces. They can be so thick that Lerner incorporates [...]

Kim Dorland. Out of Nature

Invited as artist-in-residence to the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, Toronto-based artist Kim Dorland seized the opportunity to produce a body of work inspired by the Group of Seven. The subsequent exhibition You are Here: Kim Dorland and the Return to Painting curated by Chief Curator Katarina Atanassova, juxtaposes works from [...]

Andrew Lui. Pilgrim’s Progress

There is a sense of playing off structures, of pushing into space to then move into a fluid flow in Andrew Lui’s latest series of abstract, gestural paintings. The paintings feel rooted in a sense of identity that these emergent forms are at the point of appearing and disappearing. These [...]

Between Matrice and Ruine Marc Seguin Prints. Homage to François-Xavier Marange

This double exhibition at Galerie Simon Blais is an unusual amalgam. What brings these two artists together is their pictographic sensibility. Yet each is dramatically different in the way of addressing the object/image in art. Marc Seguin is renowned for his controversial approach to art, to history, to anything in fact. He has [...]

“Sakahàn”. Lighting a Fire

As our identities are continually challenged in an age of globalization, intercultural exchange becomes increasingly a language for this world’s art. What being indigenous is, or could be, or was, all revolve around questions not just of place, but also of technology. Global migration challenges our conventional definition of indigenous [...]

Jeff Tallon. Arduous Interfaces

Synthesizing mobile technology with painting, Jeff Tallon first publicly displayed his QR Code works at the 2010 Toronto International Art Fair. The first artist to have used QR Codes in Canada, Jeff Tallon comments, “Like an early Roy Lichtenstein that provides narration, these works communicate textual material. By using QR Codes that encapsulate a [...]

Like Thunder Out of China

In today’s China, artists are perceived as “zhishifenzi” or the intellectuals “with thunder and lightning at their heels”. And this show proves that point with the human figure looming large in this blockbuster of multi-form art, video and performance art out of China. And there is always this edge of consciousness [...]

Angela Grossmann. About Fire

Best known for her collaborations as one of the Young Romantics (George Gillmore, Angela Grossmann, Attila Richard Lukacs, Vicky Marshall, Philippe Raphanel, Charles Rea, Derek Root, Mina Totino), whom were given a 1985 show at the Vancouver Art Gallery, Angela Grossmann’s engaging, atmospheric multi-media paintings address marginality, social displacement and [...]

Guy Lavigueur - Éléments / Terre

Guy Lavigueur’s aerial photographs are engaging exposes of the interface between the natural world and human activity in the landscape. Taken up in the air in Delta and Beaver light aircraft in Arizona, France, Indonesia, Senegal, over the Rockies, the Great Lakes and the Abitibi region, they are achieved in [...]

Grégoire Ferland - Tegumentum

Gregoire Ferland is something of an underground phenomenon in the Quebec sculpture scene. Largely unrecognized by the museum and public gallery culture of Quebec he has nevertheless produced a strong body of work over the years. Early on in his career, he made performances with the percussionist Guy Nadon on metal plaques at [...]

Wang Qunigsong - The History of Monuments

Wang Qingsong’s 138-foot long mural titled The History of Monuments is an elaborate photo frieze. Part performance, part art Qingsong’s clever appropriation of the bas relief look using live models covered in mud history is part of this Chinese artist’s ongoing challenge to the orthodoxy of classicism in art — both Asian and Western. Born in [...]

Wah Wing Chan
Noir sur Noir

The mixed media technique Wah Wing Chan uses for creating his playful, spontaneous works on paper involves applying acrylic paint onto paper. Wing, as he is known, then removes the surface paint. After drying, a second layer is applied. This process is repeated several times using water as a wash, [...]

Ludmila Armata
Misfits

Ludmila Armata’s Misfits presents paintings of people who do not fit anywhere. Where are they anyway? What country, what culture, and what century do they come from? They are real presences that hang in space, emerge, or dissolve. Surrounded by darkness and light that becomes a vehicle for emotion. These [...]