Recent exhibitions in New York, Spokane, and Seattle confirm the growing achievements of veteran ceramic sculptor Patti Warashina. Beginning as the ultimate escapist/fantasist in the ’60s with her sculptures Moon Dog Dream (1969) and Ketchup Kiss (1966), by the 1980s Warashina had moved on to all-white porcelain statuettes of demonic, gleeful, and revenging female figure groups.
Kicking Out the Boundaries: A Conversation with Kiki Smith
We are in a living room filled with candelabras, sculpted birds, and female figures. Birdy, the 15-year-old dove, contentedly watches the rain through a back window. Kiki Smith is leaving for Italy tomorrow to open a show and then travels to San Francisco to install a 25-year retrospective, yet she calmly draws as she discusses
Stella Waitzkin: Idiosyncrasy’s Library
The libraries of the late Stella Waitzkin (1920–2003), contained in her home and studio at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City, suggest a robust, nearly obsessional relationship between Waitzkin and books, which she immortalized as emblems and symbols of an erudition whose importance is physical as much as it is spiritual.
Willie Cole: The Other Side
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
