Willie Cole creates elegant artworks that challenge prevailing ideas of identity and perception. His combination of visually seductive materials and witty humor serves to temper his serious and sometimes difficult subject matter. In his deft hands, discarded domestic items are transformed into mythical figures and objects that carry poignant commentaries within their iconographic arrangements.
Electrifying the Inert: A Conversation with Keith Sonnier
Keith Sonnier arrived in New York in the mid-1960s, achieving early recognition with several prestigious national awards and representation by the Leo Castelli Gallery. Part of a generation of artists that included Eva Hesse, Barry Le Va, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra, and Richard Tuttle, he turned early to the medium of neon in installations that
Jae Won Lee: Intangible Landscapes
In the frozen silence of a Michigan winter, life waits below ground, breathing under ice. The vast solitary landscape parallels Jae Won Lee’s reductive art-making methodology, stripping color to subtle modulations of white, nuances that punctuate the charged stillness.
Michael Combs: Real Men Don’t Carve Handkerchiefs
Michael Combs knows the trajectory of an osprey plummeting to its prey. He knows the silhouette of a heron, haloed in the steamy mist of a rising summer sun. He can tell his life in the cycles of sea lavender or the cacophony of arctic terns warning him away from their young.
Not Vital: Being and Building
Not Vital was born in 1948 in Lower Engadine, a region in the Swiss canton of Graubünden. Twenty years later he moved to Paris to study art. He then studied sculpture at the Centre Universitaire Experimental de Vincennes.
Flat Space Sculpture: A Conversation with Gerold Miller
Is it sculpture? Is it painting? Or is it design? Gerold Miller’s work explores the borders between minimal object and conceptual context—a zone where sculpture, framed surfaces, and sculpturally and visually defined architecture meet. His empty frames of the “hard edge” and “ready-mix” series in aluminum and lacquer rigorously investigate the basic prerequisites of what
Yoshitomo Saito: Reconcilable Differences
Metal pillows, cast canvases, origami without the folds: except for the tangible fact of their existence, Yoshitomo Saito’s sculptures would seem like far-fetched fabrications. If F. Scott Fitzgerald is right that “the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the
David Smith: Freedom and Myth
David Smith is one of American art’s great apostles of freedom. He spoke about it, wrote about it, and embodied it in his life and art. He refused to be confined by rules or any other boundaries, did not let anyone else dictate to him what was aesthetically acceptable, was ever-alert to unorthodox materials and
Ingo Ronkholz: Beyond the Image
What motivates a young painter to turn his back on painting and apply his efforts to sculpture? In the case of Ingo Ronkholz, a growing feeling of the insufficiency of the “reality conveyed by painting” caused him to shift more and more to sculpture as the focus of his interest:…see the full feature in December’s
All 5 Senses: A Conversation with Terry Allen
Terry Allen is a visionary artist who expresses himself as a poet/songwriter, musician, playwright, sculptor, filmmaker, and installation artist. His subject matter is a…see the full feature in December’s magazine.
