Tag Archives: Museums & Galleries

Vibrant Matter of Painted Objects (Yoshiaki Mochizuki)

Posted on November 24, 2018 by zjb

Wandering around Chelsea last summer, we stumbled into Marlborough Contemporary and got to see Palenville, a solo show by Yoshiaki Mochizuki. It was not immediately clear what these things are. Jewel-like things, they turned out to be paintings. They are … Continue reading →

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(Lachrymose) Floating Jews and Other Black Squares (Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich)

Posted on November 21, 2018 by zjb

O Me O My, I’ve been lachrymose, this time at the Jewish Museum having seen Chagall, Lissitzky, Malevich: The Russian Avant-Garde in Vitebsk, 1918-1922. The exhibit is super cool, showing art made by Chagall with these two masters of the … Continue reading →

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Hunger Art (Chaim Soutine)

Posted on August 22, 2018 by zjb

“Still Life with Herring” sounds like a Jewish spoof on the French fine art tradition. From the same milieu of Russian Jews in Paris, Chaim Soutine is the anti-Chagall. There is nothing dreamy about his work. There is no lift … Continue reading →

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Wild Precarious Life (Cecilia Vicuña)

Posted on August 1, 2018 by zjb

This recent show of paintings, sculptural works, and installation by Cecilia Vicuña conjures together feminist cosmologies of raw and dyed wooliness, wild animal figures, and the drift of precarious forms. The painted figures are seers. Protective, they represent resistant political forces of … Continue reading →

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Placing Memory (Gal Cohen & Zac Hacmon)

Posted on July 30, 2018 by zjb

Some photos of paintings by Gal Cohen and sculpture by Zac Hacmon from their recent and thoughtful two-person show downtown on the Lower East, Placing Memory. With Hadera, Israel as their critical touchstone, the paintings explore the evisceration of the … Continue reading →

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Posthuman (Michal Rovner) Evolution

Posted on July 26, 2018 by zjb

Michal Rover’s latest show at Pace, Evolution, is hardcore posthuman. Viewed from the chilly distance of a desert, the human is seen reproduced and submerged in a collective mass of de-realized figures on the move going nowhere, submerged in technology, across … Continue reading →

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(Synthesis of Intuitions) Philosophy Art Race Religion (Adrian Piper)

Posted on July 25, 2018 by zjb

A series of black and white photographs, Food for the Spirit (1971) documents the artist and philosopher Adrian Piper, holed up and isolated at home, having thrown herself one summer into a close reading of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.  … Continue reading →

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Leon Golub Raw Nerve Radical Art

Posted on June 3, 2018 by zjb

Leon Golub was a one-note painter of political art active in the 1960s. But on what an eviscerating note. Most interesting paintings are now on view at the Met Bruer. Anti-racist and anti-war, they are all of them epic in … Continue reading →

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(Jacob & 12 Sons) Savage Jews (Francisco de Zurbarán)

Posted on April 20, 2018 by zjb

What the hell kind of Jews are these? Am not sure I’ve ever seen anything like Francisco de Zurbarán’s Jacob and His Twelve Sons: Paintings from Auckland Castle, which were on view at and soon to leave the Frick. Painted in between … Continue reading →

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Did the Jewish Museum Just Break Its Permanent Collection?

Posted on February 21, 2018 by zjb

I read here in the New York Times about the new re-organization of the permanent collection of the Jewish Museum in New York. The old exhibition was a standard historical chronology of “the Jewish experience.” The thing was heavy with … Continue reading →

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