In Hundt and Newhagen the fighting spirit of Dada is alive and well. Their work points to the extant power of irrationality.
Reviews
Hasan Elahi @ Intersection 5M
Hasan Elahi passed nine lie detector tests. But the FBI still thought he might be a terrorist. So the Bureau asked him to stay in touch. He complied. The artist filled their inbox with a torrent of useless information.
Abstraction: Then and Now @ Berkeley Art Museum
Does abstraction have a viable “third path,” between the poles of Impressionist “opticality” and Symbolist introspection? Mark Van Proyen reports.
Gottfried Helnwein @ The Crocker Art Museum
Gottfried Helnwein’s paintings and photographs tackle the persistence of evil and the cruelties perpetrated by humans against each other.
Enrique Chagoya @ di Rosa Preserve
In cross-cultural mash-ups, where indigenous icons return to a Disney-fied America, and art historical figures dance through cartoon vistas, Chagoya explores a terrain where all cultures meet and mix.
Video: Patrick Dougherty @ Palo Alto Art Center
Watch this video and learn how Dougherty transforms tons of sticks into architectural masterpieces that quite literally jump the nature/culture divide.
Alex Couwenberg @ Andrea Schwartz
Couwenberg mixes the spatial ambiguity of cyberspace with the disorienting angularity of Cubo Futurism — recasting the Southern California landscape as a mind-bending interior experience.
Christina Seely @ CCAS
Light usually signifies good things, like prosperity and knowledge. But not in Christina Seely’s images. These photos of the “brightest cities on Earth” will make you think twice the next time you flip a light switch.
Tony May @ SJICA
Tony May’s SJICA retrospective showcases the artist’s genius for embedding strong ideas in meticulously crafted objects that both tweak and invoke art history.
2010: Rear View Mirror
What made 2010 notable? OK, it was a lousy year for galleries. But most survived. More remarkably, they hosted more than a few truly memorable shows. Here are some of the highlights we covered in 2010.
Chris Daubert @ Blue Line
Action/reaction is the governing principle in this interactive light-and-sound installation in which the audience is both instigator and spectator.
The Robert Ortbal Interview
Robert Ortbal’s sculptures explore essences. Not actual essences, as in molecular structures, but unfathomable things: like the physical structure of smells as they exist in psychological, emotional and sensory space.
Ed Moses @ Brian Gross
With “wic wack”, Moses extends the abstract methods for which he is famous by running a kind of magical primitivism through a filter of Pointillism and Op. I left feeling like my molecular structure had been re-arranged.
Linda Geary @ Rena Bransten
In the Bay Area, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more exuberant, more imaginative painter than Linda Geary. Using oil, watercolor and spray paint, Geary has charted new frontiers in biomorphic abstraction.
Seth Koen @ Gregory Lind Gallery
With great economy and visual imagination, Koen creates elegant and deliciously open-ended works that tweak the orthodoxies of Minimalism while simultaneously engaging them with serious craft.
John Yoyogi Fortes @ Jack Fischer
Fortes creates an electrically charged, claustrophobic atmosphere filled with high-def images and stupefying excess, where nothing makes sense and everything seems wrapped in a cocoon of white noise.