Browse Recent Exhibition Reviews

The heart of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is its four-story Venetian courtyard around which circle palatial rooms lined with exquisite tapestries, treasures of Medieval and Renaissance art, gems of U.S. painting, and sumptuous holdings of decorative arts. Along the narrow paths of the central garden rest Grecian urns and a gently running fountain. It was here, one night in the winter of 2007, that Taro Shinoda, a guest at the Gardner’s artist-residency program, looked up into the moonlight and began to conceptualize Lunar Reflection Transmission Technique, a video installation presented in its third and most developed incarnation at… Full Review

One critical question for exhibiting past art is its contemporary relevance. Instead of asserting a work’s temporal transcendence, a more convincing way to prove its enduring life is to show that it can still captivate an audience and contribute to the creation and appreciation of art today. This is the approach taken by the exhibition Looking for Antonio Mak, an extraordinary show that brought an unprecedented vitality to the Hong Kong Museum of Art. Centered on the much-esteemed late sculptor, the exhibition prompted an engaging conversation between Mak, eight collaborating artists, and the audience. Antonio Mak Hin-yeung (1951–1994)… Full Review

Leonardo da Vinci: Hand of the Genius, organized by Atlanta’s High Museum of Art in collaboration with the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, and the Opera di Santa Maria del Fiore and Opificio delle Pietre Dure in Florence, Italy, aims to explore an aspect of Leonardo’s wide-ranging interests long acknowledged but still poorly understood. That Leonardo studied from, theorized on, and made designs for sculpture has been established through his drawings and writings yet is frustratingly absent in surviving works. This small but rich exhibition aims to bridge this gap by displaying well-known drawings alongside three-dimensional works by… Full Review

Though Anne Truitt’s art has not shaped art-historical and critical debates at the level of many of her contemporaries, whether Morris Louis, Robert Morris, Eva Hesse, and others, her work warrants all the attention the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden devoted to her in this retrospective exhibition, Anne Truitt: Perception and Reflection. Curated by Kristen Hileman, it included drawings, paintings, and sculptures by the artist from the early 1960s to 2004, the year of her death. The Hirshhorn installed Truitt’s art chronologically, which highlights how she rather quickly discovered and, with few exceptions, persisted in pursuing what would… Full Review

Renaissance art historians conventionally work in terms of types. Artistic production to a large extent can be thought of in terms of basic forms or categories—portrait, altarpiece, devotional image, etc.—customized according to the requirements of patrons. The artistic culture of Venice in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century saw the production of many objects that frustrate that approach by being insistently sui generis. Among them are a pair of marble reliefs: one signed by the sculptor/architect Tullio Lombardo around 1495, presently in the Ca’d’Oro in Venice, and another, clearly by the same artist, in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in… Full Review

Dove/O’Keeffe: Circles of Influence, a major exhibition at the Clark Art Institute curated by Debra Bricker Balken, began with an intriguing juxtaposition. Opposite the introductory text, one found Arthur Dove’s Moon (1935) mounted side by side with Georgia O’Keeffe’s last and most abstract Jack-in-the-Pulpit, VI (1930). These paintings show the two artists working in distinct styles within the modernist arc of nature abstraction. Yet the show’s organizing premise, that Dove profoundly affected O’Keeffe’s early artistic development, was here counterbalanced by a conversation. We saw the two in dialogue at mid-career, hardly referencing the deep Depression at the door, exploring… Full Review

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is ideally suited for an exhibition devoted to the theme of “Watteau, Music, and Theater” because two of Watteau’s most incisive treatments of these themes reside in its collection: the solitary singer Mezzetin (ca. 1718–20) and the tragic-comic French Comedians (ca. 1720–21). Both works also display Watteau’s ineffable fusion of performance and humanity, artifice and nature, and gestures both rote and heartfelt. The exhibition, rich in drawings as well as paintings loaned from a wide variety of institutions and private collections, allowed viewers to ponder the artist’s compelling transformation of music and theater into an… Full Review

Given its location in Chicago, the Renaissance Society was the perfect venue for Allan Sekula’s Polonia and Other Fables, forty photographs and accompanying texts three years in the making. The exhibition represented a joint commission between the Renaissance Society and the Zacheta National Gallery in Warsaw. Polonia refers to Poles living outside their country, and Chicago is host to the largest population outside of Warsaw. For centuries, Poland has been dominated by other nations, by the church, and, as this exhibition showed, by the interests of Western multi-national corporations and the U.S. military-industrial complex. Polish identity perennially… Full Review

Sacred Spain: Art and Belief in the Spanish World defied conventional boundaries of what constitutes “Spanish” art. It was a refreshingly intelligent exhibition, and ideally will set new standards for how the field is studied. It presented the imagery of Catholicism as a common denominator of Spanish identity in Old World and New. The stunning selection of objects was presented in six thematic sections to remind viewers of their original raison d’être: “In Defense of Images,” “True Likeness,” “Moving Images,” “With the Eyes of the Soul,” “Visualizing Sanctity,” and “Living with Images.” Ronda Kasl, Senior Curator of Painting… Full Review

BEFORE I’ve decided on the odd but I think appropriate approach of starting to write about Tino Sehgal before seeing the exhibition because so much discussion and disclosure has taken place about it, a lot of it on web-based networking sites such as Facebook and art sites such as Artnet, and most of it in reaction to Sehgal's efforts to control "the situation" and his brand. This discourse is part of the total experience of a project that for some is important, even transformative of the nature of art, precisely insofar as it produces discussion, not in and of… Full Review