This Thursday would have been sculptor Alexander Calder’s birthday. It seems an appropriate moment for Not Extractions, but Abstractions, a show curated by Michael Clifton, which honors and echoes Alexander Calder’s whimsical spirit and rhapsodic love of reductive forms. The exhibit is actually the second part of a show presented at Karma International in [...]
Author Archives: Caris Reid
Oscar the Grouch
June 29, 2010 – 4:05 pm
What do you get when you combine art collector Peter Brant with artist Urs Fischer? You get “Oscar the Grouch”, Peter on fire, and a reason to visit Greenwich, Connecticut. The Brant Foundation Art Study Center, which opened it’s doors to the public last year, is currently exhibiting their first solo show with [...]
Louise Bourgeois
June 1, 2010 – 8:55 pm
The grandmother of the art world has died. Louise Bourgeois was a force, a legend, and a personal hero. Still painting and sculpting well into her 90s, she seemed to ripen with age. During her prolific career, she developed a personal symbolic language of spiders, cell-like rooms and intertwined lovers, always placing [...]
Sleepwalkers
May 27, 2010 – 7:26 pm
My long-standing couple crush on Swedish artists Jockum Nordström and Mamma Andersson may have just intensified. “Who is sleeping on my pillow,” their first collaborative show at David Zwirner, is brimming with work that has been soaked, scratched and fondled. Nordström’s collages are perverted, yet tender; Andersson’s paintings are intimate yet aloof. Both shows, independently, are breathtaking, [...]
Grey Area: Julie Mehretu at the Guggenheim
May 26, 2010 – 12:49 am
Julie Mehretu’s new series Grey Area, now up at the Guggenheim, is a diary to place, the inevitability of it shaping you, and in this case, the work that comes out of it. When initially granted a commission by Deutsche Bank Series and Guggenheim in 2007, Mehretu proposed six large-scale paintings, each dedicated to urban [...]
Never Let You Go – SGINNED
May 3, 2010 – 2:17 pm
Caroline Polachek of Charlift and Jorge Elbrecht of Violens stripped the sound from a Justin Bieber music video and sang their own vocals. They call it a “Sgin” (an anagram of the word sing) which is their word for a song especially created to synch up with someone elses music video. In this case, a [...]
Introducing Clifton Benevento
March 25, 2010 – 11:11 pm
Tomorrow night with be the first opening at Michael Clifton and Michael Benevento’s new Soho Gallery, Clifton Benevento. The group show titled “Big Apple” honors an entrepreneurial group of artists who held 15 plus exhibitions and events over the past year, artshows in apartments, and events at Printed Matter, PS1 as well as [...]
Banana Man: Interview with David Salle
January 7, 2010 – 3:32 pm
Employing collage and pastiche as both form and content, the American painter David Salle has been heralded as one of the clearest representatives of postmodernism. Caris Reid met Salle in his Brooklyn studio to talk about dirty words, the internet, and his work.
Caris Reid: While looking at your paintings I kept thinking about the funny [...]
Cave Painting at Gresham’s Ghost
October 16, 2009 – 7:28 am
Alice’s descent down the rabbit hole came to mind as I stepped onto the basement stairs and a gold emblem caught my eye, like a promising flash of tail. Spray painted on the wall above me was the image of a grasshopper, the moniker of Gresham’s Ghost, the nomadic gallery that is hiding for the [...]
“Flaming Floral All Over Recline”
October 1, 2009 – 9:59 am
Oh, all over wallpaper and the eccentric beings who hang it. Diana Vreeland, the infamous fashion editor, is here reclining in a room she wanted “to look like a garden, but a garden in hell.” How right she was, the sea of red behind her looks like a Matisse painting minus the sanity. Pictured beside [...]
