SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO Ylise Kessler Gallery
Walking into a show of Elise Siegel’s ceramic “portrait” busts can be an unsettling and awkward experience. There they are—in this case, five works on pedestals—their gazes quizzical and eager, as though you, the visitor, are expected to bring something to the conversation.
“I’m interested in the ways plants orient themselves and fight; in the magnetic sensitivity and the geo-localization of great migrators; in a dog’s sense of smell, which configures its volatile world as it moves, but also its memory and self-awareness.”
BRUSSELS Mendes Wood DM
Best known for freestanding and hanging sculptures made from found and gifted fabric, thread, and wire, Gomes was born in Caetanópolis, a center for the Brazilian textile industry.
Outside his Virginia studio, Hubert Phipps and his team install Dream Wall.
El arte nutrió la vida de Pablo Dompé desde sus inicios. Habiendo nacido en familia de artistas, su cotidianeidad estuvo atravesada por la dinámica del taller y los materiales de trabajo que atrajeron su inclinación natural por crear objetos, nutrir formas y complementar el trabajo de moldeado con el estudio de la música, el dibujo y la lectura.
LONDON PEER
Bucking Soviet-style Socialist Realism, Jevrić created abstract structures consisting of bulky forms that seem to float in space, held by nails or metal rods, which serve both to support and to trap. These works made her a pioneer in Yugoslavia as she developed her own vocabulary through the juxtaposition of mass and void, solidity and weightlessness, lines and curves.
NEW YORK Kasmin
It’s vocabulary that reminds us how mathematics and philosophy like to orbit one another. Finite and infinite, rational and irrational, predictable and unpredictable, determinate and indeterminate—these are crucial complements to French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, who employs indeterminacy as both a mathematical concept and a philosophical guidepost.
“The impetus for Spaghetti Blockchain came from looking at YouTube for endless hours. Also, I’ve been considering different definitions of materialism—as a philosophical term, what it means in capitalism, and how we are composed of matter.”
Sculpture portable enough to fit in the palm of your hand, inside a pocket, or tucked into a wallet can also be invested with enough narrative power to tell an epic story. The newly published catalogue, The Scher Collection of Commemorative Medals, proves that sculpture the size of a silver dollar can assume the presence of something monumental.
Over the course of six days in 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 artifacts on display at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad were looted or destroyed. For Michael Rakowitz, an American artist of Jewish-Iraqi heritage, the desecration was personal, and it inspired an ambitious sculptural project.
