Lets get right to it, there are some exciting openings this week, starting on Thursday at Altman Siegel with New Year’s Day Swimmers, a group show featuring recent UCLA grads Laeh Glenn and Sanya Kantarovsky, and gallery artists Sara VanDerBeek, and Emily Wardill (both of whose work is consistently strange and wonderful, especially Wardill whose Fulll Firearms was a definite highlight of 2012). 

Another show I’m excited to see is the alumni exhibition as part of Root Division’s 10th anniversary celebration. This show will likely trade cohesion for celebration, with twenty artists representing a wide variety of practices having in common their participation in the Root Division studio program over the last decade. The start of a year is an excellent occasion to look at where we came from and where we are going.

NOTE:

A vague plug, we the editors are curating three exhibitions, one a week, starting Friday at Royal NoneSuch Gallery. Go to Et Al. for more info.

And, as for the best of 2012… to be honest, there was too much. Here are some facebook posts we (Aaron Harbour and Jackie Im) made on this subject:

We have been thinking a lot about what we saw this year and there was so much more than I remember....

Emily Wardill, Nate Boyce, Liam Everett and Kirsten Pieroth's red shirt at Altman Siegel. A trio of fantastic shows by ladies at Ratio 3 - Lutz Bacher (also great at Berkeley Art Museum), Mitzi Pederson, and Katarina Burin [a: so good!]. Jason Kraus and works by Martin Soto Climent at Jessica Silverman Gallery. [a: also Dashiel Manley's shows at Silverman the gallery and the fair booth] Ciprian Muresan at SFMOMA and Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts. Stage Presence, Descriptive Acts, Rineke Dijkstra, Shana Moulton, Richard T. Walker, and John Smith films at SFMOMA. Fred Wilson at Rena Bransten Gallery. Paul Cowan at Important Projects. Hillary Wiedemann at MacArthur b Arthur. John Hiltunen at Paule Anglim and at NADA. George Pfau's video at Royal NoneSuch Gallery [a: !!!]. Cybele Lyle at Pro Arts and her and Luca's Royal NoneSuch Show. Ends of the Earth at MOCA LA. Danh Vo at Artspeak. Jay Chung & Q Takeki Maeda at Redcat. And...Kuchar, Kuchar and more Kuchar at SFAI Mc Bean Galleries... the current show at The Popular Workshop 'Somewhere in the Fold'...

Im: oh my god there was way more: Mark Benson at Ever Gold and Mark Benson's demure nudies at ArtMRKT. Christopher West's cards at Adobe Gallery. James Sterling Pitt's work at Eli Ridgway (which looked good both in the gallery and at the fair), Carrie Schneider photos, and Jacqueline Gordon at Eli Ridgway Gallery, Facundo Arganaraz at the Popular Workshop. Taha Belal at Haines Gallery. Apichatpong Weerasethakul's video at the Asian Art Museum.

Harbour: Kate Bonner at Queens Nails! Falke Pisano at Pied-a-Terre, Mounira Al Solh, The Sea Is A Stereo at the Grunt in Vancouver!!!! And it gets worse if we start listing talks... or albums I stumbled onto...

IM: Nina Beier at Proyectos Monclova's booth at Art Basel. R.H. Quaytman and Gareth James at Miguel Abreu's booth at Basel.

Harbour: Generally speaking... Frank Smigiel's work at SFMOMA killed it last year….(this conversation went on, and on, and continues)

Curiously Direct Picks

Highlight Gallery//Marine Hugonnier and Taha Belal: Disrupt= A great two person show which opened in 2012 and I missed until the new year, which is to say it would be a highlight of that recently deceased year had I seen it in time. Instead, it is a must see today. Despite being very conservatively curated, both in its hanging and in the pairing of two very similar practices (colored interventions on printed matter, newspapers etc.), the works themselves are quite special. Belal’s works continue to impress (as they did in the recent small show at Haines), with their patient geometrics invading the highly charged surfaces they are applied to. Hugonnier’s work replaces the imagery of newspaper pages from historically complex times with pure color; the push and pull of abstraction at a distance versus the countless small narratives revealed when looking closely at these works (in adition to their main headline story) is engaging. A great show.

curiously direct