Flying Ant Day

GOOD TIMES & NOCTURNAL NEWS #3

Quite a number of works at the 2016 Independent Art Fair in New York transport you to the domestic sphere or contemplate personal ideas of home. Very fitting for the fair that after six years in Chelsea, has found a new home in Tribeca. 

In Wordplay: Matthias Buchinger’s Drawings from the Collection of Ricky Jay, opening today at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, there’s a 1724 engraved self-portrait that the “Little Man of Nuremberg” would have used to promote his act. As the portrait shows, the German-born artist, who stood 29 inches tall, was born without hands or feet.

LONDON — Losing the Compass, at White Cube in London’s Mason’s Yard, aspires to critique geographical, aesthetic, and other sorts of hierarchies. Ironically, it doesn’t entirely do so; if anything, within the gallery’s own stark “geography,” it often reinforces them instead.

News of artist Hema Upadhyay’s death in Mumbai over the weekend has stunned the international art community. Upadhyay, 42, was a painter and mixed media artist who showed with Mumbai gallery Chemould Prescott Road, and had been featured in landmark shows in the global trajectory of Indian contemporary art, including Indian Highway (Serpentine Gallery, 2008) and Chalo! India (Mori Art Museum, 2009). Her work was characterized by a deep emotional sensitivity to the realities of poverty and displacement, and she was known for seamlessly linking personal trauma with environmental and human crises to evocative effect. Upadhyay frequently used collaged elements from newspapers in her paintings, which dealt poetically with questions of violence and erasure.