Interview

Agathe Snow was born in Corsica, but she's really a native of downtown New York. Her art isn't so much about the quiet piece on display as it is about groups and communities, tight pockets of friends celebrating, living, drinking, dancing, and everything in between. Snow has hosted 24-hour dance marathons and war-themed dinner parties, and, last fall, at James Fuentes LLC gallery in New York, she showed swirling sculptures made out of street detritus, like computers and fabric, that were utterly lyrical and violently terrifying.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/29/08

Eddie Martinez is indomitable. He is a prolific draftsman, an active curator, and he's getting ready to fill a four-story gallery in Seoul, South Korea, early next year. His idiosyncratic drawing style is deceptively simple and has the magical, faux naïve quality of Paul Klee.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/29/08

At first, Gardar Eide Einarsson's work could be mistaken for the kind of art made by a lot of young, white New York guys these days. There's plenty of graffiti, references to gangs, skateboarders, the police, a couple flags with dark mottos, and even cameos by radicals like the Unabomber.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

In the early 2000s, a young painter emerged on the New York art scene, known for his hauntingly seductive figure paintings of friends and family members, executed in bright, bold colors and often set against elaborate wallpaper motifs. Mathew Cerletty, who shows at Rivington Arms gallery in New York, could have remained his generation's premier portrait artist. But in the last few years the 28-year-old Wisconsin native went in a completely different direction, creating strangely confrontational sign and word pieces that range from bizarre koans like "The Feeling is Mutual" to "Diet Coke" logos. Turns out, the words are just as autobiographical.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

At her solo exhibition in New York City last spring, 44-year-old artist Josephine Meckseper showed a six-minute film titled O% Down, a hot and incendiary black-and-white remix of car commercials set to a merciless industrial-noise song called "Total War."  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

Born in the Bronx, Kori Newkirk first moved to California for graduate art school in 1995 and eventually settled in Los Angeles, where he began making work out of such obscure but provocative materials as hair extensions, pony beads, and pomade.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

Unlike in fashion, in the art world, you don't define work in terms of looks, models, and seasons. But then an artist like 33-year-old painter Katherine Bernhardt comes along and takes fashion photos, magazine spreads, and model poses as her subject matter. She basically turns the latest Versace campaign or Kate Moss editorial into an immortal, high-art form. The Missouri-born artist, who is usually in New York but has been jumping around Europe in various residencies lately, paints fast, with a brutal, slash-strike brush style that hardly goes easy on beauty.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

He is one of our most successful and prolific artists. And a golfer, a car nut, a collector, and a connoisseur of the side of American culture they don't write about in books. He's a hepcat who removed himself from urban bohemia to explore America from a ruined rural landscape in hollering distance of the Borscht Belt. A pioneer of appropriation, lately he's been suggesting art could be a car, a handbag, or a video game.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08

We all have things wiped from our memories. Sometimes that's good, sometimes not. But Mike Kelley's sculptures and installations are impossible to forget-he challenges what we see and how we see it. He plumbs the depths of childhood, repressed memory, psychoanalysis, and pop mythos-but that's just the starting point for an individual speculative universe where things make startling, weird sense.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 11/28/08