“This is a sculpture show,” Matthew Gallagher says of his mini-retrospective exhibit at Hedge Gallery. “Everything is sculpture. There’s no such thing as the second dimension.” He insists on this point (which is perhaps debatable – literally a matter of perspective) because much of what he does as an artist ends up hanging on a wall, yet is more akin […]
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While FRONT International: Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art occupies other rooms at the Akron Art Museum, Clevelander Jerry Birchfield brings his multimedia, photo-based work to the Fred and Laura Ruth Bidwell Gallery through September 23. “And many of them that sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.” […]
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The number of artists who applied to the curated CAN Triennial exhibition was enormous, and the range of their experience and accomplishment, the diversity of their techniques and perspectives all were inspiring. We should not be surprised: this is emblematic of the energy and intensity visible every week in the Cleveland art scene. In all, curators William Busta, Angelica Pozo, […]
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Among the most moving contributions made by LGBTQ artists to new aesthetic and political perspectives are photographs – forthright, often sensuous testimony about self-concepts, social roles and gender identities. Mind-altering troves of recent contemporary portraits and studies of intimate or informal human interactions, expand upon the example of revolutionary photographers of the past several decades. Nan Goldin and Catherine Opie, […]
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Dana Schutz’s solo show of mostly new, mainly huge paintings at Transformer Station, called Eating Atom Bombs, starts off quietly enough. A smaller oil painting hung near the entrance, Bird in Throat shows an androgynous human head with close-cropped hair, rising from a green t-shirt. The shirt has an odd stripe along the neck-hole. A warm yellow glow in the […]
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“Excellence has no sex,” the German-born American artist Eva Hesse once remarked in an interview. That unassailable truth is born out in A Century of Women in Prints, 1917-2017, on view through December 17 in the Stern Gallery West of the Allen Memorial Art Museum in Oberlin. Curated by Andaleeb Badiee Banta, with the assistance of Oberlin student Claire Rasmussen […]
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Soon after the end of the Second World War, Abstract Expressionism blew a hole in art history. The cultural effect was comparable to the Manhattan Project. Abstract Expressionism (AE) effectively transformed Western art, replacing the tattered late-modern remains of aesthetic intention and technique with guiding principles derived in part from psychoanalysis and Freud’s theories of the unconscious. Accidental marks, the […]
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How much is too much when everything is not enough? Welcome to the new Gilded Age, to climb onto a trope made famous by economist Thomas Picketty in his 2013 book “Capitalism in the 21st Century.” The original “Gilded Age” (so-dubbed by Mark Twain to describe the last quarter of the 19th century), was shiny and fundamentally rotten, just like […]
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Nothing speaks of mystery with more sibilance than an ancient tomb, where half-seen shapes whisper to the unconscious mind. Ohio University professor Tom Bartel’s most recent ceramic works, glazed with metallic oxides and high kiln temperatures to a cindery brownish-black, mean to evoke just that response. Installed in a small room to one side of a large gallery at […]
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The following brief interview with Jens Hofmann was conducted via email at his request. Hoffman is probably the best known of the two art world luminaries (famed Chicago artist Michelle Grabner is the other) recruited by FRONT Executive Director Fred Bidwell and his team as co-artistic directors for the experimental, conceptually-driven event. Their job is to recruit artists, but also […]
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