My mind, though enfeebled by New Year's celebrations, was fine; I'd traveled to Queens to see Jeffrey Joyal's "my Life Underground" at Gandt. For this exhibition, the gallery left its longtime home in a basement for a column-laden miniature ballroom in a clinic up the block, complete with a wrought-iron chandelier and ghostly portrait hanging above the crown molding. Walking through the lobby to the exhibition room, I passed by an empty suggestion box entreating patients to "rate their therapist."
Framed between two decisive historical thresholds-the death of Emperor Hirohito in 1989 and the 2011 Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear disaster- Prism of the Real: Making Art in Japan 1989-2010 re-examines two transformative decades in Japanese art. The exhibition challenges the idea of "Japan" as a fixed national entity, instead situating artistic practice within the fluid global exchanges of late capitalism.
PRELUDIO follows the line begun with the Vestigio series, in which the artist Aryz - Octavi Arrizabalaga (2x cover artist) engages in a dialogue with some of the creators who have influenced him throughout his career. On this occasion, he presents a series of large-format oil paintings conceived as small visual dialogues with the great masters of painting. Each work is a tribute to the classical pictorial tradition and some of its fundamental themes.