Published on Artforum.com, September 27, 2007. To see the review in context, click here. This exhibition is the largest US presentation of Zurich-based Iranian artist Shirana Shahbazi’s photographs to date. It is an assembly of archetypes, offering still lifes, portraits, and landscapes rendered with a formal clarity that corresponds to received notions of Swiss precision [...]

Published as “Bottled Water” on Artforum.com on May 14, 2007. STYKKISHÖLMUR, ICELAND—Certain artists and writers mark a location with an indelible stamp. Venice, for example, is often filtered through the eyes of Turner, Mann, Ruskin, and the poet Joseph Brodsky. After a two-day journey to Iceland to catch the opening of “My Oz,” Roni Horn’s [...]

Published on Artforum.com on April 16, 2007. To see the review in context, click here. In contrast to the haphazard chic that characterizes neighboring art spaces and boutiques, nearly everything about this one-year-old Lower East Side gallery is rigorously composed, from its visual identity to its intriguing program of contemporary and historical exhibitions, avant-garde film [...]

Published on Artforum.com on February 8, 2007. To see the review in context, click here. Like a concept album or a marvel of structural engineering, this exhibition is greater than the sum of its parts; each canvas ineluctably reinforces all of the others. Elegantly installed in the Renaissance Society’s double-height galleries, it comprises a decade’s [...]

Published on Artforum.com on January 4, 2007. To see the review in context, click here. Since her solo debut at this gallery, photographer Melanie Schiff has moved out of the studio and into the world, trading fussily arranged, evenly lit still lifes for more casual, serendipitous compositions of everyday objects. These photos are hymns to [...]

Published on Artforum.com on September 14, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. Those who have seen this Chinese artist’s earlier films will find familiar imagery scattered throughout No Snow on the Broken Bridge, 2006: a freeze-frame tableau in which seven young men and women, dressed in a haberdasher’s finest, look outward from [...]

Published on Artforum.com on June 21, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. Susan Sontag, relentlessly curious, roamed widely across the cultural landscape, the specificity of her writing compensating for her occasional lack of specialist knowledge. This jewel-box exhibition, which draws its title from her thin, seminal book first published in 1977, acknowledges [...]

Published on Artforum.com on June 19, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. The three midsize canvases in this Los Angeles–based artist’s exhibition, each a slightly different view of the same rocky outcrop, would be of little interest were they not so well executed; instead, they argue convincingly for the value of painting [...]

Published on Artforum.com on April 12, 2006. To see the review in context, click here. Sze Tsung Leong’s gorgeous, abundantly detailed, medium- to large-size photographs of Chinese cities undergoing cataclysmic change fuse Edward Burtynsky’s synoptic aerial views, Elger Esser’s blanched palette, and the patient attentiveness evident in underappreciated Japanese photographer Ryuji Miyamoto’s mid-’80s “Architectural Apocalypse” [...]

Published on Artforum.com on February 8, 2006. For more information about the exhibition, click here; to see the review in context, click here. One could easily recommend any of the small, sharply focused exhibitions now on view at White Columns; my favorite is John Stezaker’s show in one of the gallery’s “White Rooms.” Despite a [...]

Published on Artforum.com on December 14, 2005. For more information about the exhibition, click here; to see the review in context, click here. Had Richard Prince organized this show, he would’ve called it “Twenty Women Looking in Every Direction.” But Harry Callahan, an acclaimed though under-exhibited photographer perhaps best known for loving, often experimental portraits [...]

Published on Artforum.com on June 10, 2005. To see the review in context, click here. The highlight of the Whitney’s intermittently brilliant 2002 Joan Mitchell retrospective was the second gallery, where six paintings from the late ’50s and early ’60s were installed. Each was a cacophonous swirl of oils that you could easily imagine freeing [...]

Published on Artforum.com on April 27, 2005. To see the review in context, click here; for more information, click here. After seeing several Jim Lambie exhibitions conceived as installations—”Paradise Garage” in Venice in 2003, “Mental Oyster” in New York last year—it’s a pleasure to once again be reminded of his proficiency as a sculptor, a [...]

Published on Artforum.com on February 25, 2005. To see the review in context, click here. In his first solo show with this gallery, Minnesota native Rob Fischer presents wonderful sculptures, pretty good painted photographs, and just-OK paintings that all up the ante on his peculiar blend of high plains anomie and rural ecology. He combines [...]

Published as “Red Alert” on Artforum.com on February 3, 2005. To see the diary entry in context, click here. BERLIN—”We are here to view an art exhibition. We are here for art, not politics,” Klaus Biesenbach said emphatically during his opening remarks at last Friday’s private reception for “Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition,” the new [...]

Published on Artforum.com on October 27, 2004. To see the review in context, click here. Spencer Finch has pursued the boundaries of perception doggedly and imaginatively for the better part of a decade, and his longstanding interest in transposition (often involving installations in which he recreates the qualities of natural light found at a culturally [...]

Published on Artforum.com on October 25, 2004. To see the review in context, click here. Like the two slim poetry volumes Rimbaud published by age 20, David Wojnarowicz’s “Rimbaud in New York” photos, shot in his early twenties, are a fully realized aesthetic statement. The forty-four small black-and-white photographs in this show (accompanied by a [...]

Published on Artforum.com on November 25, 2003. To see the review in context, click here. Matthew Buckingham’s A Man of the Crowd, 2003, is a formally elegant, conceptually rich 16 mm film installation that mimics the structure of Edgar Allan Poe’s similarly titled short story of 1840. Poe’s London is now contemporary Vienna; Buckingham’s camera [...]