Jean Conner @ San Jose Museum of Art. For decades, Conner operated in the shadows of her famous, flamboyant husband, Bruce. Now, with the spotlight shifted, we saw, for the first time, the breadth of a diverse and still-expanding oeuvre. Mining women’s magazines of the 1960s and 1970s, which seemed to satirize what they pretended to celebrate, Conner built collages that pushed deep into Surrealism, anticipating later developments like Femmage, which employed patterned fabric pastiches as a rebuke to Greenbergian formalism. This retrospective also revealed plenty of counterculture visual mannerisms, indicating that future accounts would do well to place Conner on equal footing with her more famous contemporaries, Jess Collins and Wallace Berman.
Jutta Haeckel @ Hosfelt. How often do we encounter an artist who’s reinvigorating painting? Jutta Haeckel, a 51-year-old Düsseldorf artist, pulls off that rare feat. Her process begins with jute, whose threads she pries apart to create loose scaffolds onto which she suspends dense “topographies,” readable as microscopic visions or views from space. She achieves these effects by pushing paint through the rear of the grid and projecting abstract images onto the front, which she paints realistically and dots with clusters of neon-colored paint nubs. Throughout, one can detect the influence of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, but it’s her synthesis of their ideas that stands in memory. The results played havoc with the senses and asserted painting’s textile essence.
- David Roth, Squarecylinder.com
