This is the Forward’s coverage of the visual arts, including painting, drawing, sculpture, ceramics, and crafts.
Visual Art
The Latest
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The Schmooze AIDS Epidemic as Echo of the Holocaust
Until two of them passed away of complications from AIDS in 1994, the art collective known as General Idea produced an enormous body of intellectually engaging, provocative, and savagely witty work, much of which explored notions of identity and social control. On July 30, the trio will get its first comprehensive retrospective at the Art…
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The Schmooze How Lucian Freud Found His Faith in Realism
In 1993, Lucian Freud, the painter known for his sharp psychological portraits of friends and family often sprawled nude in his studio, painted his own portrait. “Now the very least I can do is paint myself naked,” the artist said. Called “Painter Working, Reflection,” the work shows the artist, then 71, facing the viewer with…
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The Schmooze El Lissitzky’s Everyday Avant-Garde
El Lissitzky, ‘For the Voice (Dlia golosa),’ 1923. Courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago. “Record” is a tiny work of art, measuring no more than a few inches in either direction. But the photographic print, created by the Russian Jewish artist El Lissitzky in 1926, may be the signature piece in “Avant-Garde Art in…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Tennis Playing Czars and Chicken Wielding Rabbis in Russia’s Silver Age
When you’ve already had 10 solo exhibits by age 12 and been named the world’s youngest professional artist by the Guinness Book of World Records, where do you go from there? In the case of Stanislav “Stass” Shpanin, a 21-year-old artist from the Former Soviet Republic of Azerbaijan, you just keep painting. Since arriving in…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Micha Ullman’s Fixed and Fluid Sculptures
‘Chair’ by Micha Ullman, From ‘Under,’ 2011. Courtesy of The Israel Museum. Despite an almost clinical spareness immediately evident at The Israel Museum’s new Micha Ullman exhibition, one quickly comes to appreciate that the works — individually and as a whole — hint at something more than the stark minimalism they first suggest. Chairs appear…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: A Sculptor at Work
Arnold Newman, Chaim Gross with ‘Happy Mother,’ 1942. Courtesy of the Renee and Chaim Gross Foundation and the Arnold Newman Archive. During the 1939-40 New York World’s Fair, sculptor Chaim Gross (1904-1991) spent two summer months outdoors, working in front of crowds that totalled some 80,000 people. “I would look them over and if they…
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The Schmooze Q&A: Photographer Maya Barkai’s Walking and Working Worldwide Icons
Photo by Dan Keinan. Courtesy of Maya Barkai. In Downtown Manhattan, an international city where pedestrians clog the sidewalks, photographer Maya Barkai’s “Walking Men” fits right in. At the same time, these 99 life-size representations of “walk” signals from around the globe definitely stand out. “Walking Men 99,” an art installation stretching 500 feet around…
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The Schmooze Slideshow: Brooklyn, the Shtetl
On her website, artist Ali Spechler describes her interest in “the notion of family and how shared experiences, whether positive or negative, breed strength and support.” That may not be the intuitive reaction to most of the works in “Brooklyn Shtetl,” Spechler’s current show at New York’s Hadas Gallery. After all, most of the paintings…
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