Staff Picks: Andrew Kuo, Bill Brandt

Please check out Andrew Kuo’s exhibition of new paintings, Andrew Kuo: You Say Tomato, opening tonight at Marlborough: http://www.marlboroughgallery.com/exhibitions/andrew-kuo. I’m new to his work, but I like the way Kuo’s paintings detach infographic tropes from big data before reattaching them to small emotions. It’s as if lab scientists have data-modeled the neural pathways of a synesthete who happens to be an expert on color theory. It’s hard to think of paintings more appropriate to the Age of Nate Silver.
                                                                                                                 —J. Kyle Sturgeon

I came for the photographs and stayed for the conversation. That’s how I would describe my past two Fridays in Bill Brandt’s wartime London currently exhibited at the MoMA (“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light”). Behind the dark, alluring photographs of the London Blitz, toothless hotel maids, and impoverished children is a narrative; however, this narrative is not necessarily created by Brandt, or even London, but instead by the exhibit participants. After finding my favorite photograph, “Kensington Children’s Party, 1934,” I turned my attention away from the photo to the people coming and going beside me.  Their comments ranged from obvious observations—the juxtaposition of the lines created by the balloon and its string, the doe-like eyes of the boy, the suspicious chandelier—to more provocative questions of artistic intent, but what quickly became apparent was that the photo itself was merely a certificate of presence—validation that there was a party in Kensington in 1934—and the job of filling in the rest belonged to the gallery participants.
                                                                                                                 —Brittany Stigler