There’s nothing expedient about Ricky Swallow’s work. For his wood carvings, he uses Japanese tools that require continual sharpening as he “gains information by removing material” from large pieces of jelutong, the Malay hardwood he favors.
The Machines Have Not Taken Over: A Conversation with Richard Dupont
Richard Dupont’s sculptures are essentially warped-out, three-dimensional photocopies of himself. These eerie, distorted, hi-tech self-portraits seem stretched by the time/space continuum to varying degrees, from barely recognizable blurs to attenuated or distended humanoid oddities. As viewers, we physically enter that same disconcertingly surreal realm, like a cinematic fantasy of traveling through a worm hole.
Julia Venske & Gregor Spänle: The Antithesis of Marble
For Julia Venske and Gregor Spänle, a “shopping spree” is not what you might expect. Last summer, they drove three hours from their studio to buy three blocks—three or four metric tons altogether—of pure white marble.
Public Art in New York City Parks: Celebrating 40 Years
In 2007, the New York City Department of Parks celebrated the 40th anniversary of its public art program with a documentary gallery exhibition and a city-wide series of outdoor installations. The indoor show, a compelling walk through history, was curated by Jonathan Kuhn, director of Art and Antiquities at New York Parks and Recreation.
Confronting the Grotesque: A Conversation with Folkert de Jong
Folkert de Jong aims for the solar plexus. His life-sized figures, grouped in open tableau-like arrangements, are startling. Made from Styrofoam and polyurethane foam, they strike archaizing poses fraught with allusions to earlier art, appearing brittle, yet on the verge of collapse, oozing in places and liquefying in others.
Pilar Ovalle: Place in Nature/ Nature in Place
Pilar Ovalle has developed a personal language of sculpture based on the tactile, multi-dimensional experience of wood as a medium. She is part of a young generation of Chilean sculptors who are now beginning to emerge on the international scene.
Won Lee: The Dionysian Strain
Korean-born sculptor Won Lee lives and works in Toronto. For his studio, he uses an older house with a salon-style workspace, a back porch, and a sizable storage basement (the house where he and his wife reside is on the other side of town).
Es ist alles gut/Everything’s Fine: Peter Fischli and David Weiss
The adventuresome and optimistic skeptic Peter Fischli was producing exciting concert posters and album covers when he met the laid-back and melancholy nerd and inventor David Weiss. That was back in 1979. The two artists from Zurich have been working together ever since.
Anne Wilson: New Labor
Anne Wilson’s impeccably executed sculpture is grounded in an aesthetic revolution forged by Post-Minimalists, feminists, and fiber artists who took up malleable, expressive, fibrous materials in the late 1960s and ’70s to challenge the intellectual and physical rigidity of Minimalism.
Alain Kirili: The Sculptural Body
Artists are urban creatures, especially in youth, and they nearly always choose one metropolis in preference to every other—the grainy immediacies of New York, for example, or the refinements of Paris. Alain Kirili is perhaps the only artist of his generation to belong to the art worlds of both cities.
