Athena Tacha seeks out natural wonders: slot canyons in Utah, volcanoes in Hawaii, mudboils in New Zealand, glaciers in Patagonia, and, always it seems, water and the magnificent patterns, forms, and effects it has wrought the world over.
Esoteric Practices: A Conversation with Brian Catling
Brian Catling (b.1948) is Professor of Fine Art at the University of Oxford and Head of Sculpture at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. He recently won the commission to create a permanent memorial for the Tower of London Site of Execution, which was unveiled in September 2006.
Gerda Steiner + Jörg Lenzlinger: Visions of Paradise
Falling Garden (2003), an enchanting installation at the Venice Biennale, turned Gerda Steiner and Jörg Lenzlinger into instant international celebrities. The Swiss Art Commission had invited the young Swiss artist couple to create an work in the church of San Stae.
Figural Poetry: A Conversation with Manuel Neri
Manuel Neri was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2006. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Manuel Neri, the son of Mexican immigrants, was born in the San Joaquin Valley in California in 1930.
The Form in Time: Manuel Neri’s Relief Sculptures
In the mid-1980s, Manuel Neri began building sculptures that evoked the relief carvings and architectural friezes of antiquity, a materially substantial format based on the integration of figure and ground. At that time, he had been giving exclusive attention to the figure for more than 20 years and already was closely identified with the solitary
Robert Rauschenberg: A New Sculptural Idiom
Robert Rauschenberg’s Combines, created between 1954 and 1964, were revolutionary in the history of art. Leo Steinberg called them a “shift from nature to culture,” and his characterization is still the most successful critical description. Others have discussed the works as collages, grids, “definitive incongruity,” and “relaxed symmetry.”
David Eckard: The Object as Diary
Just before leaving his studio in Portland, Oregon, for a four-month residency in France at the Pont Aven School of Art last year, David Eckard worked feverishly to finish the sculptures—or “objects,” as he calls them—for his fall exhibition at the Manuel Izquierdo Gallery at the Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Elizabeth Turk: The Collars
With The Armory Show and its cousin once-removed, the Whitney Biennial, now in the recent past, what remains standing in the memory? For this viewer, several works about town, most especially Elizabeth Turk’s exhibition at Hirschl & Adler Modern, palliated an acute case of Stendhal syndrome and restored faith in art’s ability to be meaningful
Rath Around the House (The Greats of Rath)
We gave our Doberman to my sister-in-law the other day. Her kids had always loved Orenthal. Besides, “Juice” had gone docile on us over the last decade, his sentry instincts replaced by drooling and excessive gas.
Alan Rath: Meta Mechanics
We’ve all had about enough of machines. Computers break down; ATMs swallow bank cards; cell phones, MP3s and DVD players inconveniently die in the midst of declarations of undying love. Galleries and museums often seem like the last vestiges of unmechanized culture, packed with objects made, as we like to say, by hand—never mind that
