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Artist Jonathan Lasker joins Rail Editor-at-Large Choghakate Kazarian for a conversation. We conclude with a collaborative reading by Jessica Grim & Melanie Neilson.

Learn more: https://brooklynrail.org/events/2021/...

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Since the 1980s, artist Jonathan Lasker has transformed a visual language inherited from modernism into a syntax all his own, making paintings that exert both analytical rigor and an undeniably visceral appeal. Born Yesterday, his first solo exhibition with Greene Naftali, spans four decades from Lasker’s early career to the present, occasioning new interpretations of his singular brand of abstraction and its lasting impact on generations of artists. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; The Power Plant Contemporary Art Center, Toronto; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, among others.

Curator and art historian Choghakate Kazarian was formerly a curator at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and taught at the École du Louvre. She has curated exhibitions on artists such as Lucio Fontana, Piero Manzoni, Karel Appel, and Henry Darger, and she has edited various exhibition catalogues and published on postwar art, outsider art, Marcel Duchamp, and Louis Michel Eilshemius. She is Editor-at-Large at the Brooklyn Rail and is a ph.d. candidate at the Courtauld Institute of Art, where she is writing a dissertation on Albert Pinkham Ryder. She is currently a Terra Foundation fellow at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Rail has a tradition of ending our conversations with a poem, and on this day we were fortunate to have Jessica Grim Melanie Neilson reading.

Poet Jessica Grim is the author of several books of poetry including Vexed (BlazeVOX Books & Ubu Editions 2009), Fray (Litmus Press 1998), Locale (Potes & Poets Press 1995), and The Inveterate Life (O Books 1990). From 1989–2000, alongside Melanie Nielson, she cofounded and edited Big Allis, a magazine focused on experimental writing by women. Grim lives in Ohio.

Poet Melanie Neilson’s books include Civil Noir (Roof Books 1991), Natural Facts (Potes & Poets Press 1996), and several chapbooks. Her poems are included in anthologies, most recently in Rage Baking: The Transformative Power of Flour, Fury, and Women’s Voices by Kathy Gunst and Katherine Alford (Tiller Press 2020). She lives in New York City.

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Learn more about our conversations with artists at: https://brooklynrail.org/events
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