Galerie Magazine

If the Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art isn’t a little bit chaotic and confrontational, we’d be surprised and maybe disappointed—the world’s signature state-of-contemporary art event is famous for giving us what critic Robert Hughes called (in a different context) “the shock of the new.”

I still remember my first Whitney Biennial, the famously fractious 1993 edition, during which some visitors were given a button reading I Can’t Ever Imagine Wanting to Be White, a work by Daniel J. Martinez. That meant we were off to the races.

The latest edition, running March 8 through August 23, was organized by Whitney curators Marcel Guerrero and Drew Sawyer, and the mood is closer to low-key unease, with occasional flare-ups. There are several sound-based works, which help set an atmosphere and a moody echo throughout the show.

...

Kamrooz Aram, the subject of a great show at Alexander Gray Associates right now, shows four of his elegant abstract paintings, one of which also features a cabinet incorporating a couple of ceramic pieces. Another of Aram’s works has a folding screen, not a canvas, for a base, a move that is part of his interrogation of what kind of art is considered “decorative,” and who gets to decide that. Regardless of the meta art narrative, he knows how to use curve and color brilliantly.