Month: May 2014

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Subodh Gupta

Agnieszka Gratza

This review of Subodh Gupta’s ‘Everything Is Inside’ at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi appeared in frieze: Subodh Gupta, Ray, 2012, stainless steel and stainless-steel utensils, 6 × 4 × 4 m Curated by Germano Celant (with input from Delhi-based gallerist Peter Nagy) ‘Everything is Inside’, Subodh Gupta’s recent retrospective actually began outside of the museum with a monumental installation pointing the way to Jaipur House, the more remarkable of the two buildings in which the exhibition was housed. A cascade of gleaming pots and pans, tiffin boxes and jugs tumbling down from a stainless-steel bucket seemingly suspended in the air, … Continue reading Subodh Gupta

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L’Heure des sorcières

Agnieszka Gratza

This review of “L’Heure des sorcières” at Quimper’s Le Quartier appeared on artforum.com: Mary Beth Edelson, Proposals for: Memorials to 9,000,000 Women Burned as Witches in the Christian Era, 1977, mixed media, dimensions variable. Installation view. Spread throughout four rooms, this thematic group exhibition takes as its starting point Breton myths and legends as portrayed by nineteenth-century French artists in works borrowed from the local Musée des Beaux Arts. Drawing on traditional basket-weaving techniques, ethnographic approaches, and oral histories, Paris-based artist Marie Preston’s sculpture piece Barque sorcière (Witch Boat), 2014, and accompanying fictional dialogue involving four characters—a druidess, a painter, … Continue reading L’Heure des sorcières

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Performa Through the Senses

Agnieszka Gratza

A review of Performa13: It’s not every day you get to see a saxophone being deep-fried on the High Line. The deed was done when I got there, but the smell of it lingered in the air. (A deep-fried saxophone smells much like anything deep-fried, only more so.) A friend gave me a blow-by-blow account of Jamal Cyrus’s Texas Fried Tenor, borne out by photographic evidence showing the crowd’s reaction to this jaw-dropping event brought to us by Performa, jointly with NYU’s Grey Art Gallery and The Studio Museum in Harlem (as part of the controversial Radical Presence: Black Performance … Continue reading Performa Through the Senses

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Exit Ghosts

Agnieszka Gratza

This feature on Agnieszka Kurant appeared in frieze:  Emergency Exit, 2010, (collaboration with the architect Aleksandra Wasilkowska), fog machines, metal, fans, neons, dimensions variable. Courtesy: National Art Gallery Zacheta, Warsaw; photograph: Maciej Landsberg ‘How does it feel to write about a person of the same name?’ curator Raimundas Malašauskas asked me after I’d complimented him on his idio­syncratic contribution to Agnieszka Kurant’s monograph, Unknown Unknown (2008), which took the form of an interview with a fictional artist also called Agnieszka Kurant. (In fact, Malašauskas has been known to use the name ‘Agnieszka Kurant’ as a pseudonym on occasion.) I related … Continue reading Exit Ghosts