Belgian artist Johan Muyle found his voice 40 years ago with La Modification (1984), an aptly named assemblage sculpture that borrows its title from Michel Butor’s celebrated 1957 novel. Consisting of a recliner attached to ropes and nooses, with a crate suspended between bicycle wheels placed behind, the entire ensemble evokes an instrument of torture or execution.
Disruptor of Objects: A Conversation with Bharti Kher
Transformation—both material and metaphysical—lies at the heart of Bharti Kher’s career-long project to deconstruct the details of everyday life and rearrange them into more honest, if brutal truths. Like the literary masters of metamorphosis Ovid and Kafka, she moves between certainty and uncertainty in order to construct parables of contemporary life and of the body.
Giovanni Anselmo: Entering the Work
Giovanni Anselmo’s works are predicated on action. As a result, they always seem to exist in the present moment—dynamic presentations of materials that resist aesthetic resolution, with each encounter constituting a perceptual experience that empowers individual outcomes and discoveries.
Finding Hybridabad: A Conversation with Osman Khan
More than two years in the making, “Road to Hybridabad” marks the culmination of an interwoven narrative that Detroit-based artist Osman Khan has been building for his entire life. Drawing on literary classics like One Thousand and One Nights and Waiting for Godot, the exhibition (currently on view at MASS MoCA) employs ordinary, familiar objects—telephone
Soul Mirror: A Conversation with Sali Muller
Contemporary conceptual artist Sali Muller produces multimedia works which not only explore light and its impact on the objects, installations, and sculptures she creates, but also as a soul mirror that reflects her own spirituality as well as social matters that highlight individual and collective experiences and relationships.
Gaming Precarity: A Conversation with Cathy Della Lucia
While much contemporary art deals with questions of materiality, the things that make up an artwork, and how artists collaborate with material properties to locate spaces of aesthetic ease, Cathy Della Lucia’s work directly opposes her materials.
Charisse Pearlina Weston: Interior Life
I spend a lot of time walking through New York and often find myself in front of condo construction sites, gawking at high-end living exemplified by floor-to-ceiling expanses of glass.
New Beginning: A Conversation with Ernesto Neto
Ernesto Neto’s surprising, multi-part installation at Le Bon Marché, a department store in central Paris, was inspired by the story of Adam and Eve—before and after the bite into the apple. Reweaving the Genesis narrative with other mythologies, he creates an immersive and interactive meditation on life and our place in the natural world.
Infinite and Infinitesimal: A Conversation with Randy Polumbo
Boundaries between nature, living space, and fine art dissolve in Randy Polumbo’s universe. His works glow with a startling mix of materials—airplane and trailer parts, silvered upholstery, glittery cast and blown glass, LEDs, mirrored and metal sheets, baked mycelium, and looping videos.
Un electroshock creativo: Una Conversación con Fernando Poggio
Hace varios años escribí sobre la obra de Fernando Poggio. Leyendo mis propias palabras, encuentro que siguen respetando el espíritu de su trabajo. Dije entonces, y me cito: “Diseñador y artista visual, Fernando Poggio crea objetos de diseño y pinta obras apasionadas de pura materia, explosivas visualmente que impactan en la percepción del espectador por su
