Weekend

August 21, 2021 • View in browser

This week, John Yau looks at Serge Poliakoff’s shape-shifting abstract gouaches and discusses the poets and artists of the influential West Coast postwar underground, while Eileen G’Sell takes note of Pablo Larraín’s stylized melodrama, Ema, and Nolan Kelly parses the verbal stylings of “indie giant” Garielle Lutz.
From Baltimore, Barry Nemett explores the uncomfortable beauty of Tschabalala Self’s reimagined bodies, and in London, Michael Glover describes the work of Paula Rego, whose father read her Dante’s Divine Comedy as a child, in words freighted with particular resonance for this week’s events: “These paintings seem to suggest how we can be haunted by our own lives — unwelcome memories, repressed fears, the loomings of bad conscience, the road untaken …"
— Thomas Micchelli, Co-Editor, Hyperallergic Weekend

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Paula Rego’s Independent Spirit

Rego’s women are always independent spirits, and they are often raging. | Michael Glover

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Tschabalala Self’s Sensual Stories of Race, Sex, and Power

From one project to the next, Self reinvents herself and reimagines how to portray the human body. | Barry Nemett

Two West Coast Communities of Artists and Poets

One thing seems pretty clear about both groups: they separated themselves from mainstream culture, including the art world. This is practically unheard of today. | John Yau

A World Made of Words

Garielle Lutz's sentences are among the most original in modern English, their linguistic specificity making them virtually untranslatable. | Nolan Kelly

An Icon of Unconventional Abstraction

Serge Poliakoff: Gouaches 1938-1969 furthers the case for Poliakoff’s importance and continuing relevance to abstract painting, particularly for artists working outside any movement or stylistic tendency. | John Yau

Ema’s Visuals Ignite the Screen, but Its Story Ultimately Flickers Out

Director Pablo Larraín doesn’t trust his own filmographic brilliance, and lets story take over in the end. | Eileen G’Sell

Required Reading

This week, the battle over book reviews, Alice Neel's populism, Herat's history with the Taliban, considering cultural appropriation, and more. | Hrag Vartanian

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