The British artist Andy Goldsworthy moved to Penpont, a village in southwest Scotland, in 1986, when he was thirty. The area's initial appeal was twofold. Property was cheap, which meant that Goldsworthy and his wife at the time, Judith Gregson, could acquire an unrenovated stone building that had likely once stored grain. This structure could serve as a workspace and, for a while, as a rough-and-ready home.
In the case of the Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr, who has died after a long illness, at the age of seventy, I confess that I'd expected-without necessarily hoping for-a faint premonition, perhaps a grim tingle in our collective cinephile sixth sense. Tarr, unique among his European art-film contemporaries, cut an almost oracular figure. The greatest of the nine features he directed,
The exhibition gathers three strands - haircuts, still lifes, and a storefront - into a single season, a climate of attention for small, ordinary acts. In the haircut series, intimacy is staged at close range: a pair negotiating blades and trust, one seated in vulnerability, the other holding the shears. The vertical format elongates the encounter, turning an ordinary trim into something ritualistic, even a little dangerous. Flesh tones are chalky, almost earthen, as if the body were drawn from the ground.