Reviews and Links for Final Week : Christopher K. Ho's "Regional Painting": an Artforum.com Critics' Pick

This is the last week for the two great exhibitions we have up at the moment: Christopher K. Ho's "Regional Painting" and "What is left," the Curatorial Research Lab exhibition organized by Rachel Gugelberger and featuring work by Nina Lola Bachhuber, Elissa Levy and Nick Herman.

Both shows have stirred up a fair bit of discussion in the gallery, as well as online. The openings for these shows were back in November, so unless you have a time machine, you're not able to join in that discussion. You can, however, get a feel for how packed it was from Amir Shoucri and Julia Halperin's wonderful video of the opening for the New York Observer:

Christopher K. Ho @ Winkleman Gallery from The New York Observer on Vimeo.

More importantly, you still have time to stop by and see the exhibitions and join in the conversation yourself. Here's a taste of what how critics are responding:

Artforum.com's Critics' Pick by Nuit Banai:

Judging from the caliber of the paintings and the memoir’s sophisticated register of discourse, Ho’s/Rothko’s conclusion is every “insider’s” escape fantasy. Yet, as Paul Gauguin, Marcel Duchamp, and Claude Lévi-Strauss have aptly shown us, the fabrication of such cultural myths and artistic personae has been crucial to the regeneration of intellectual and aesthetic production during modernism’s constitution and critique. Rather than assessing the truth status of such constructs, we need to ask why they appear at specific historical junctures and what artistic and institutional possibilities they might engender.

Hyperallergic's review by Stephen Truax:

If Ho is seriously proposing regionalism as the next and only logical step forward for artistic production, why then does he reinforce his paintings with performance, philosophy, and fictional narrative? Much of the show’s conceptual apparatus occurs in the press release, the price list, the book, and subsequent interviews with the artist and Ed Winkleman; it demands much investment and thought and work from the viewer.

And regarding the Curatorial Research Lab show, Bradley Rubenstein notes in Culture Catch:

The premise that the traces of the changing exhibition (nail holes, plaster, etc.) is as good a metaphor for the curatorial process as we are likely to get -- the materiality of moving works of art around is, in the end, what curating is, all money and politics aside.

And, there are still copies available of Christopher's brilliant book (the memoir of Hirsch E.P. Rothko). They make great stocking-stuffers for those art world lovers on your list. And, they're FREE!