Author: Daphne Whitaker

There is an old argument, quiet and unresolved, running beneath every painting Lib Mason makes: that beauty and discomfort are not opposites, but companions, and that one can be made to carry the other for as long as a viewer is willing to keep looking. An Inheritance, Repurposed Mason’s technical vocabulary comes from elsewhere, from Flemish panels and Renaissance workshops, from a tradition built on grisaille and glaze, where a painting begins in monochrome and only slowly, through repeated transparent layers, arrives at color and light. She did not inherit this method by accident. It was chosen, deliberately, roughly eight…

Before he was an artist known for canvases that speak in server codes, Yi Zhu spent years watching people compete for attention inside boardrooms, retail shelves, and advertising pitches. He ran a design company. He knew what it felt like to chase a client’s approval, to lose a pitch, to win an award and feel nothing shift underneath it. Long before “429 Too Many Requests” became the title of a painting, he had lived something close to its meaning, professionally, for years. That history matters, because it explains why 201 → 429 → 503, the series that has become central…

St. Gallen – The Kunstmuseum St. Gallen presents the first institutional solo exhibition in Switzerland by the internationally renowned artist Sheila Hicks from February 4 to May 14. Sheila Hicks’ imagination is limitless. The artist, who has been based in Paris since 1964, works with natural materials in vibrant hues. She is constantly knotting, weaving, and spinning new forms out of wool, linen, and silk. On the one hand, the artist was influenced by modernism, having studied painting at Yale University under Bauhaus master Josef Albers. She is, on the other hand, influenced by traditional crafts from several continents, which…

Linz , The Lentos Kunstmuseum presents Unforeseeable Occurrences by Anita Witek from January 27 to April 16. Anita Witek’s artistic output is centered on our visual habits and the reality of images and texts emerging in the mass media, which she investigates through the medium of photography. The artist is fascinated by the specific information that images record in addition to their principal subjects, which she uses as material for her collages. Her works reveal the originals’ latent aesthetic and ideological contents and transform them into the topic of independent associative stories expressed through images. The Lentos is exhibiting Anita…

Aarhus, Cindy Sherman: Tapestries will be on display at the ARoS Aarhus Art Museum  Cindy Sherman is well known for her long-running picture series in which she turns herself into characters. A new internet series debuted in 2017. Sherman began posting “selfies.” These stunning images, which comment on the phenomena of face altering apps or applications, have been given new grandeur and permanent significance through the use of the fine and recognized technique of tapestry. Sherman combines 21st century “face” technology with the traditional skill of tapestry production in Tapestries to produce new images that are rich in texture and…

Chicago, MCA Chicago presents Duane Linklater: mymothersside from March 11 to September 3, 2023. The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) has announced the opening of a new exhibition, Duane Linklater: mymothersside, on March 11. The exhibit features the work of Duane Linklater, an artist who explores the exclusion of Indigenous content from museums and the contradictions of contemporary Indigenous life within settler systems of knowledge, representation, and value. The exhibition includes sculptures, video works, and digital prints on linen spanning the past decade of the artist’s practice, as well as a newly commissioned work for the MCA’s atrium. Linklater’s work…

Berlin, The Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) in Berlin will reopen on June 2-4, 2023, with a sequence of blessings, concerts, lectures, offerings, performances, processions, readings, and rituals. The opening weekend Acts of Opening Again: A Choreography of Conviviality is a chance to welcome the public to the new HKW. All visitors are invited to participate in a performative installation by contributing gestures in the form of poems, songs, gifts, or other symbolic offerings as part of Bernardo Oyarzún’s work El Medán. NOT waiting…, a newly-commissioned performance by nora chipaumire & Germaine Acogny and concerts by Oumou Sangaré, Estrellas del Caribe, and Awilo…

Greg Sholette’s Insurrection (1984/2021) involves a short text repeatedly silkscreened on four adjacent panels that remain half concealed under a lush thicket of synthetic flora native to Latin America. The phrase is from an 1858 treatise by archaeologist and onetime United States chargé d’affaires in Central America E.G. Squier, who promoted the white supremacist ideology of Manifest Destiny via the tropes of evolutionary naturalism, calling US colonization nothing more than assistance to a fate that would otherwise unfold at a slower pace: “Deus Vult it is the will of God!” Insurrection was first exhibited at Marian Goodman Gallery in New York as part of…

Alexandra Metcalf, silent forms of interspecies panic, 2024, oil and decoupage on linen, 66 7⁄8 × 51 1⁄8″. “Every father wants a pink dress and bows on their little girls,” said a young female punk rocker sitting in the audience during a mid 1980s episode of Phil Donahue’s talk show. The subject for discussion was outrageous youth fashion. Up on stage sat Serena Dank, founding member of support group Parents of Punkers, who during that decade became a spokesperson for all of the parents horrified by their children’s anarchic taste in fashion and music.  I sought out this grainy recording on YouTube…

How do you want to die? My response to this question, posed during a death workshop organized by Le’Andra LeSeur in conjunction with her recent exhibition, was startling: lying in a windowed room, surrounded by family, with no regrets. This vision showed me not only what I want at the end, but what I’d like more of now. Thinking about dying is thinking about living, the artist said. The idea that confronting death can lead to a more meaningful present grounds “Monument Eternal,” an exhibition that ignites from the outset with an invocation of jazz musician Alice Coltrane’s 1977 autobiography…