Public art has undergone epochal shifts over the past half century, as Joyce Pomeroy Schwartz tells (and shows) us in The Private Eye in Public Art. A memoir and informative survey (but not a history, she says), the book demonstrates that she was in the thick of things from the 1970s onward.
Diane Simpson
NEW YORK James Cohan Essentially collagraph plates that were too large for the printing press, the “Constructed Paintings” are axonometric renderings that embrace the idea of depth without illusion.
Grenville Davey: Duality Paradoxes
“People are not naïve in the way that they approach objects,” Grenville Davey told British cultural critic Tim Marlow in 1993, “but there are other possibilities, however oblique.” Davey’s sculpture deals with those “other possibilities,” particularly the place of the human within the physical world as material fact.
Object Lessons: Elizabeth Atterbury
Folding Fan is based on a fan that belonged to my maternal grandmother, Lily Lung-Yi Liu Wang. I have no memory of her using it, nor can I recall when I pulled it out of a box, hung it on my studio wall, and started thinking about it as a form.
Gianni Caravaggio
TURIN, ITALY Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Torino “Seed,” as image and word, is just one metaphor in a show where metaphors proliferate. In this way, Caravaggio addresses complex phenomenological, cognitive, and artistic concepts with paradoxical lightness and simplicity.
Missing Pieces: A Conversation with Gabriel Chaile
Gabriel Chaile blends past and present in his poetic sculptures, uniting ancient ritual and function with a contemporary social consciousness. His colossal adobe oven-creatures inspired by pre-Columbian forms are regularly used for baking empanadas and bringing people together to share a meal.
Temporalities and Memories: A Conversation with Solange Pessoa
Solange Pessoa’s work deals in substances and relations between things that, for her, relate to the history of the earth and of humanity. She draws attention to states of matter and processes of change, giving meaning to material energies.
Between Narratives: A Conversation with Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran
Ramesh Mario Nithiyendran—who was born in Sri Lanka and grew up in Australia—has created an underworld, or dreamworld, populated by idols for his first European exhibition, “Idols of Mud and Water.”
Tottering Monsters: A Conversation with Joseph Buckley
Joseph Buckley hails from Leeds, U.K., but since 2013, he has been developing his practice in the United States, first in Connecticut while studying for his MFA in Sculpture at Yale School of Art and now in New York.
El Anatsui
LONDON Tate Modern Long before being commissioned for Turbine Hall, El Anatsui knew the Tate name. When he was growing up in Ghana (formerly known as Gold Coast, a British Crown colony until 1957), the only cube sugar available was supplied by the London-based conglomerate, Tate and Lyle.
