New York mag art critic Jerry Saltz, he of the gender parity crusade at MoMA and Glenn Beck challenge, profiles seven female artists in this week’s issue. Saltz points out that 36 percent of New York gallery solo shows are featuring women this fall, up from 17 percent in 2005, and highlights a cross-section of “gender-bending” work by women, including a full-scale museum show by multimedia artist Roni Horn at The Whitney.
© Roni Horn and courtesy of the Whitney Museum Of American Art: “You Are the Weather [detail],” (1994-95).
In collaboration with the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art is displaying a mid-career retrospective of Roni Horn, including her incisive portraiture photography, abstracted cast glass sculpture, and cut and dyed drawings. Some of Horn’s more ambiguous work belies what Saltz terms an “Apollonian aesthetic,” a “poetic” study of perception.
Exhibition poster showing the anagram title; Adam Reich/courtesy of Deitch Projects: “Here and Now/and Nowhere” installation view.
Tauba Auerbach’s “Here and Now/ And Nowhere” exhibition at Deitch Projects (also home to Swoon, Kristin Baker, and Elizabeth Neel) pairs the artist’s cerebral trompe l’oeil color field paintings with a pump organ installation and other works meant to examine order versus randomness. The so-called Auerglass gets a workout each day at 5 p.m. from Auerbach and partner Canerib Naskrew — the instrument only works when two people play.
Courtesy of the artist and Luhring Augustine, New York: “Tear (2008) and “One Another” (2008).
Luhring Augustine kicks off its fall programming with work by Janine Antoni that portrays the body as a measure of the surrounding world — or, as Antoni puts it, “The body becomes a funnel through which the world has been poured.” Digital C-prints of stretched skin and an installation combining video of a blinking eye with a lead wrecking ball and construction site soundtrack explore ideas of destruction, motherhood, and fantasy.
Courtesy of the artist and Mitchell-Innes & Nash: “Astride Mama Burro, Now Dead” (2007) and “Doyle, CA: Cuervo Saying It Won’t Come and to Quit So We Can Drive to The Gas Station and Buy More Wine” (2007).
In “This Train is Bound for Glory” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, Justine Kurland’s documentary-style photos capture a subculture of nomads and hobos that speak to the artist’s wanderlust. Infused with an edge often seen in the literary works of uber-masculine writers like Hemingway and Kerouac, Kurland‘s photographs are laden with a sense of manifest destiny and noticeably absent of the stereotypical “woman making art” perspective.