Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

This review will examine the exhibition of French prints at the Getty Research Institute from June to September 2015, and its companion volume, A Kingdom of Images: French Prints in the Age of Louis XIV. There is some divergence between the contents of the exhibition and the book, which is not strictly speaking a catalogue: the grouping of subjects in the exhibition differs somewhat from the arrangement in the volume, while some images in the exhibition are not featured in the book, and vice versa. Together they offer a broad spectrum of prints, elegantly presented in the exhibition and… Full Review

It is safe to assume that museumgoers in San Francisco, home to the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (YBCA), are as up on new technology as any public, and that the Bay Area’s traditionally progressive inhabitants are invested in balancing commercial profit and social justice. Yet as the exhibition Earth Machines quickly reveals, the local Silicon Valley high-tech industry propels a cycle of innovation and consumption that threatens to outstrip our ability to understand and manage its global, social, and environmental consequences. Curator Ceci Moss has convened an international set of artists—Alisa Baremboym, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe… Full Review

Featuring work from 1960 through the present, Billy Apple®: The Artist Has to Live Like Everybody Else was one of the most significant survey exhibitions ever accorded a living New Zealand artist. Staged in the country’s largest public art museum, it gave institutional and public recognition to an extraordinarily complex and comprehensive individual practice, and demonstrated the importance of a Pop-Conceptualism nexus to the recent history of New Zealand art. The title of the exhibition and the accompanying handbook—Billy Apple®: A Life in Parts—pointed to the centrality of biography as a key lens through which to… Full Review

Co-organized by the National Gallery of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum, Gustave Caillebotte: The Painter’s Eye presents fifty canvases produced during the period when the artist was most directly engaged with the Impressionist group, between 1875 and the early 1880s. These were the years, according to curators Mary Morton and George Shackelford, when Gustave Caillebotte was at his best—when he was still living in Paris and closely connected with artists like Auguste Renoir and Edgar Degas. Yet, notably, the exhibition does not include the word “Impressionist” in its title. By contrast, in previous Caillebotte shows, the term has played… Full Review

Alex Katz, This Is Now offers a refreshing look at Katz’s landscapes, which, as the exhibition clearly demonstrates, have occupied the artist throughout his career. Those primarily familiar with Katz’s figurative work and portraiture, subjects for which he is arguably best known, discover another, important aspect of Katz’s oeuvre, one that does not entirely leave the figures behind, while those already knowledgeable about his landscapes enjoy compelling compositions and provocative pairings that deepen an appreciation of the artist’s achievements in this genre. Wieland Family Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art Michael Rooks brings together around fifty paintings, from… Full Review

Visitors to the exhibition Discovering the Impressionists: Paul Durand-Ruel and the New Painting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art were funneled through a darkened passageway bordered by two fictive windows through which one glimpsed large archival photographs of two of Paul Durand-Ruel’s major galleries. On the left was his Paris establishment from 1869 until 1882 at 16 rue Laffitte, while on the right was his first New York branch on Fifth Avenue, opened in 1887, and a testament to the dealer’s ambitious foray into the international market. Once past this threshold, museumgoers were greeted by an 1866 portrait of a… Full Review

Mexico City-based Belgian artist Francis Alÿs has long been interested in socio-political issues stemming from territory and displacement within marginalized communities, as witnessed through the vestiges of immigration, natural disasters, and warfare. Thus, it is no surprise that these themes feature prominently in three projects in his major solo exhibition, A Story of Negotiation, curated by Cuauhtémoc Medina and beautifully displayed at the Museo Tamayo. Installed in three generously sized white-cube spaces, Don’t Cross the Bridge Before You Get to the River (2008), Tornado (2000–2010), and Reel-Unreel (2011) consist of a symbiotic relationship between the artist’s chosen mediums of… Full Review

Organized around twenty-three chapters, each of which takes its name from the title of an artwork included in that section, America Is Hard to See, the inaugural exhibition in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s new building, jettisoned a purely chronological or conventional art-movement “ism” organizational structure in favor of a thematic one. The result challenged traditional (one might say, outmoded) categories of art history and created unexpected juxtapositions that pushed viewers to understand that history—and the history of the United States—in fresh ways. The exhibition does move in linear fashion from the eighth floor to the fifth; but… Full Review

Nestled in a small gallery in the Ahmanson Building of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and timed to coincide with the museum’s fiftieth anniversary, From the Archives: Art and Technology at LACMA, 1967–1971 offers viewers new insights into one of the institution’s most legendary curatorial endeavors. Organized by Associate Curator Jennifer King, From the Archives draws from various institutional holdings in order to reflect on how, by linking the visual arts to an expansive nexus of economic and political concern (the aerospace companies, movie studios, and industrial conglomerates that powered the greater Los Angeles region during the… Full Review

Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World, curated by Jens M. Daehner and Kenneth Lapatin, opens with an empty limestone base from Corinth featuring cuttings for the feet of a bronze figure and inscribed “Lysippos made [this].” In his Natural History (34.37), Pliny credits Lysippos with creating 1,500 bronze statues, none of which have survived. The base serves as a stark reminder of how few large-scale bronze sculptures remain today while also presaging themes explored in this remarkable exhibition. The Hellenistic period stretched from the late fourth-century BCE reign of Alexander the Great until the rise of… Full Review