Haim Sokol

Haim Sokol is a conceptual artist dividing his time between Moscow and Jerusalem. It seems as if many contemporary artists choose to work between places- see Mark Manders below. Sokol who grew up in the Soviet Union and immigrated to Israel at the age of seventeen returned to Russia after seventeen more years to become a staple of the burgeoning Moscow art scene. Sokol's subject matter oscillates between personal memory and collective history. Specifically I feel his work has to do as much with the Russian history as with the artist's own and the interwoven state of these histories. His approach to the work is more poetic than scientific. For example, among the materials of his work he lists time. Sokol's work includes a performance of planting (as in a tree) old railway sleepers, creating a public monument in the shape of painfully out-of-reach post office box and various other more gallery space-oriented pieces.

Goodbye Lucien Freud.

Mark Manders

What's up with the Dutch and the Belgians? These guys are just great - Zeno X Gallery proves it. Recent discovery for me is Mark Manders - who works between Netherlands and Belgium. We saw his show at the Walker (which is such a great contemporary museum!) in Minneapolis on a recent visit. Manders creates rooms filled with strange (of course) objects and environments. His use of materials is very subtle - old wooden planks, modern furniture, metal, various objects meticulously recreated to 88% of their original size, plaster. There is a somewhat surreal aura that his art emanates, but the work moves beyond your standard surrealist trickery and does not seem dated. In an interview at the Aspen Museum of Art he talks about the logic of his work. However, it's a very peculiar logic. His decision-making in the work can't be retraced, but it makes sense nonetheless. My experience looking at his work was akin peeking behind a curtain of the everyday where banal becomes mysterious. Many artists strive for that but very few have achieved it.