“Untitled (Rorschach),” a 1999 work by Sigmar Polke.(Photo: Alistair Overruck/Estateof Sigmar Polke/Artists Rights Society) The current show of Sigmar Polke’s work at MOMA, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1963-2010, is staggeringly expansive. With 260 works of art filling 10 galleries plus the atrium, the curators wisely moved most of the accompanying text into a 30 page handout […]
MOMA
De Kooningingly Up and Down
Rosy Fingered Dawn at Louise Point, 1963 Pirate, 1981 With so many thoughtful and well written reviews already available of the MOMA’s blockbuster retrospective of De Kooning, it is easy to give myself permission to take a more personal jaunt through the seven decades’ worth of work on display. John Elderfield‘s curatorial mastery is in […]
Neri Oxman and Materialecology
Ab Ex at the MOMA The works of Abstract Expressionists are on view on multiple floors at the MOMA right now. Worth the visit, but it wasn’t a heart stopper for me. It felt more like the obligatory pilgrimage devout Catholics make to the Vatican out of respect rather than passion. My MOMA moments of […]
Finding (and Keeping) the Mind of a Child
“My Hands Are My Heart,” by Gabriel Orozco (Photo: Courtesy of the artist) The Gabriel Orozco show at the MOMA has disappointed more critics than it has pleased. Orozco now is, after all, an international jet setter art star (who, as Deborah Sontag pointed out in her review in the New York Times, can afford […]
From a High Small Place
Self Portrait with Masks, James Ensor It is easy for someone like me, who has been studying art for a lifetime, to convince myself that I have an accurate measure of the dimensions of a particular artist’s operative domain. But gratefully that conceit has not resulted in a callow disregard, and I love when my […]