Saul Ostrow
Saul Ostrow is an independent critic, and curator, Art Editor at Large for Bomb Magazine.
Charles Gaines: Southern Trees
By Saul OstrowBy abstracting Gaines’s processes and its operation we can tie his game of building and deploying systems to the real world—they are models of the way in which the particular loses its identity and becomes part of a category. Gaines’s works, then, function as analogies whose subject is the construction and discernment of identity.
David Deutsch: Hurly-Burly
By Saul OstrowGiven a selection of earlier works in the lower gallery at Eva Presenhuber it is apparent that Deutsch has always been aware that what differentiates a mimetic image from an abstract one is that an image’s mimetic function of simulation is at its highest when the medium least asserts itself; inversely when the medium asserts itself most viewers see its materiality and not what may be encoded in it.
KP Brehmer: World in Mind
By Saul OstrowIn his effort to subvert capitalism’s visual representation of politics, economics, science, consumer culture, and everyday life, KP Brehmer adopted a graphic designer’s aesthetic to produce diagrams, postcards, inserts, multiples, posters, banners, and displays.
William Corwin: Lethe-Wards
By Saul OstrowIn 2021 on the occasion of his exhibition Green Ladder, I had written that artist William Corwin’s works are “discursive, and recursive, while his subject-matter and contents are heterogeneous, interdisciplinary, and multi-cultural. Often Corwin is a time-traveler filling his sculptures with esoteric, mystical, and mundane knowledge from the past.
Simone Leigh
By Saul OstrowSimone Leigh makes highly refined and stylish sculptures that seemingly tell consciously constructed stories as well as unintended ones. The installation of this exhibition of her works at the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) in Boston is stark, dramatic, and elegant.
Alex Katz: Gathering
By Saul OstrowIt might be best to think of it as a tightly-knit show of selected works, which unravels about half-way through as Katz’s imagery becomes increasingly abstract.
Let Us Start by Identifying Differing Ends
By Saul OstrowI have been asked to consider this moment as an opportunity to elucidate what we can learn from what happens when a major museum decides to expand and the contingent consequences of that decision as it affects the future of art within the city.
