The works that best exemplify a uniquely German grotesque in Reexamining the Grotesque are those that reflect the war and Weimar years.
Natalie Haddad
Natalie Haddad is an editor at Hyperallergic and art writer. She received her PhD in Art History, Theory and Criticism at the University of California San Diego. Her research focuses on World War I and Weimar-era German art. She has written extensively on modern and contemporary art and has contributed essays to various art publications and exhibition catalogues.
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Can Commodities Really Critique Commodity Culture?
Given a platform to say something — about first-world capitalism, its attendant environmental destruction, or the definition of the self through objects — why not use it?
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The Happily Haunted Cinema of Guy Maddin
The twilight state between dreaming and waking that permeates a restoration of Maddin’s Tales from the Gimli Hospital echoes that of life and death in his films.
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Lynda Benglis Basks in the Light of Her Art
In Benglis’s latest works, the forces of gravity that defined her seminal poured latex and polyurethane pieces are traded for luminous bronzes.
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Reveling in the Ruins of the Past
In attempting to convey atrocities that confound language, artist Phyllida Barlow comes up against a paradox with no easy resolution.
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The Prescient Politics of a Seminal Conceptual Photographer
Nearly a decade after his death in 2013, Phel Steinmetz’s attention to the effects of capitalism on the environment can be recognized as both political and prescient.
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The Cerebral Art of Wrestling
Wrestling is less a physical act than a psychological space in Mark Yang’s paintings.
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The Politics of Desire and Oppression in Anita Steckel’s Art
Steckel compelled audiences to acknowledge uncomfortable realities about systemic sexism that persist decades later.
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Jon Pylypchuk’s Chorus of Loss
Pylypchuk’s art has always been deeply engaged with the most painful parts of life, those that human beings tend to push aside or deny in order to get by.
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Paulina Peavy, the Spiritualist Artist Who Channeled a UFO
Through her encounters with the spirit Lacamo, Peavy developed a cosmology based on 12,000-year cycles of evolution.
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Rosemary Mayer’s Art of the Unseen
For Mayer, the passage of time is imbued with a sense of melancholy, of something already lost to the past.
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Fred Eversley’s Joyful Light
Eversley’s parabolic sculptures draw us into a self-aware and ever-shifting encounter with space and perceptual phenomena.