Tauba Auerbach has expanded her range of inquiry from an early focus on the semiotics of written language; now she frequently devises small-scale experiments in unpredictability to be carried out in the studio. She carefully designs criteria for these operations, disciplines the variables under her control (most of which are identified with artistic subjectivity), and then carries her investigations to their logical conclusions. That the resultant artworks do not always match up to the expected results—what should be truly random often in fact follows chaotic patterns—raises fascinating questions about chance, circumstance, and intention.

My essay “New York: Branching Out” is included in The Judith Rothschild Foundation Contemporary Drawings Collection Catalogue Raisonné, published recently by the Museum of Modern Art, New York. It focuses on developments in the New York art world from 2003 to 2005, the years in which the drawings collection was being compiled, and begins this way [...]

Published as “The Storyteller” in the exhibition catalogue accompanying Ryan Gander’s exhibition “Heralded as the New Black.” The exhibition premiered at the IKON Gallery, Brimingham, and traveled to the South London Gallery and the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam. For more information, click here.
“I am attracted to ellipsis, to the unsaid, to suggestion, to eloquent, [...]

Essay for the book Matias Faldbakken: Not Made Visible (JRP Ringier, 2007).
You can draw a zigzag line across history and the arts, highlighting negation as a force of change by connecting, for example, Martin Luther to Bartleby the Scrivener to Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased de Kooning Drawing to Lee Lozano to the World Social Forum. Negation [...]

The Uncertain States of America Reader, published by Sternberg Press in late 2006, is an anthology of essays about and of interest to contemporary artists. The book was published to accompany an exhibition of the same name, which was presented at the Astrup Fearnley Museum of Modern Art in Oslo, the Center for Curatorial Studies [...]

Published in Vitamin D: New Perspectives in Drawing (Phaidon), 2005.
“The most important thing about the work is that it is destroyed,” says Glasgow-based artist Richard Wright about his gouache wall paintings, improvised on site and covered over at the end of each exhibition. His mostly abstract works, which often occupy very little of the given [...]

Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here.

From a billboard detergent advertisement to the weather forecast on the morning radio, from the menu at a favorite restaurant to snippets of conversation overheard in line at the DMV, we constantly process, sort, and decide [...]

Published in the catalogue accompanying the short-lived exhibition “Terminal Five.” To read more about the exhibition, click here and here.
Mark Handforth possesses the increasingly rare ability to make sculptures that engage the eye, the body, and the mind. With an incisive wit and visual sophistication, the Miami-based artist pairs the handmade with appropriated everyday objects, [...]

Published in a brochure accompanying the artist’s solo exhibition in the Hammer Projects series at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles. For more information and images, click here.

Milwaukee-based Argentinean artist Santiago Cucullu chooses historically marginalized figures and events (often from his homeland’s anarchist movement) as the subject of his works, which include large wall drawings made [...]

Published in the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue.
New York artist Aïda Ruilova creates short format videos inspired by the collage aesthetic of avant-garde cinema and the tensions that horror films elicit. Maximizing the power of both sound and image, Ruilova’s meticulously edited works compress cinema’s narrative conventions to highlight physical and psychic conflicts. Her subjects, [...]

Published in the 2004 Whitney Biennial exhibition catalogue.
Lecia Dole-Recio creates variously scaled artworks that can simultaneously be considered paintings, drawings, collages, or wall-based sculptures. Using a wide array of materials including cardboard, paper, tape, a knife, graphite, and glue in addition to paint, her hybrid works employ a language of handmade geometric abstraction to explore [...]