002: Monster (self)
Soft Sculpture: an art newsletter
Seeing
Kati Heck at Bortolami, presented by Sadie Coles HQ. Even in this modest upstairs space, Heck’s fully conceived exhibition (which includes 7 paintings and a cast iron sculpture emitting steam from the gallery floor) asserts itself. The works are so virtuosic and confrontational – the large tableau so completely unforgettable – that I got the rare physical-art-sensation. Susan Canning wrote the accompanying text and describes one of Heck’s strategies as “enigmatic noncompliance”, which felt correct. You can find a self portrait by the German-born Heck in the trio of “Monster” works, titled Monster (self) (2025). Dear Cobalt Monsters is on view through August 8 at 39 Walker Street.
Joeun Kim Aatchim at Francois Ghebaly. I ducked in after a quick bite at Manousheh Grand where, casually, the servers and several customers were singing along to Celine Dion’s “It’s All Coming Back To Me Now”. Apt, as the theme of memory is imbued so strongly in Aatchim’s intimate, multi-layered silk paintings. Portraits and still-lives are presented here in artist-devised framing and hanging techniques, that – like her subjects – leave expectations slightly ajar. Elsewhere, she has painted a pair of her own shoes and cast popcorn in bronze. I remember several rainy afternoons spent in Joeun’s studio, where the clock announces the strike of each hour aloud so time doesn’t slip out of focus. Red Ribbon is on view through today, June 7, at 391 Grand Street.
Rosemarie Trockel at Gladstone. A two-part show with Sprüth Magers uptown, but Gladstone has the recent works in Chelsea. At turns withholding and generously referential, Trockel’s exhibition extends her use of industrial and mechanic materials like steel and concrete, and returns to the form of the stovetop motif (a perspex sofa is supported by what seems to be a manipulated induction coil). Even the most human of textures – the faces in her photographic portraits and album covers – seem held at a distance through the conduit of the camera’s mechanism (so much so that I wondered if they were produced using AI – it turns out they are composites that do include AI generated images). The Kiss is on view through August 1 at 515 West 24th Street.
Reading
Seeing this old friend of a painting (it’s in the Tate’s collection) in Sargent & Paris at the MET led me for the first time to Vernon Lee’s Psychology of an Art Writer, republished in 2018 as part of David Zwirner’s ekphrasis series. Lee, whose portrait Sargent painted in 1881, was the nom de plume of the queer British art historian and critic Violet Paget (1856–1935). Her reflections on the evolution of an aesthetic sensibility trace her more instinctive teenage years through to a learned midlife, at which point she insists her tastes have not much changed. A tangent: Lee was introduced to Isabella Stewart Gardner by Henry James in 1886, and the two later spent significant periods of time together in Venice shopping for antiquarian books. Several of these books, as well as Lee’s own texts, are now housed at the ISG Museum’s “Vatichino”, a narrow gallery housing some of the founder’s most personal items.
Margo Jefferson interviewed by Hilton Als in The Paris Review’s spring issue. I read Constructing a Nervous System a year ago and decided to revisit it as a companion to the conversation with Als. In it, Jefferson tells us, “I want memoir and criticism to merge.” This is a book filled with desire and inquiry, articulated through wide swaths of references and an unconstrained register that switches sharply (somehow seamlessly) from idea to idea. Almost chosen at random, here’s one of her many perfect sentences: “I’ll never renounce the pleasures the feminine has always given me: its materials, its histories, its small rituals and grand designs."
Snapshots
Alphabet Magazine, Issue 2 – Lorna Simpson Source Notes at the MET – An Allen Berke painting from the joint exhibition Allen Berke & Lise Soskolne at Ulrik – Pan Am uniform, 1971
