Luisa Rabbia employs the human form to express existential themes, ranging from physical and spiritual transformation to the interconnectivity of all beings. Despite its figurative aspects, her eclectic body of work, consisting of sculptures, installations, drawings, and animated videos, tends toward abstraction.
Aljoscha: Germinating New Art
Dateline: Tuesday, March 17, 2009. At Cologne’s Museum Ludwig, a young man moves toward Portable War Memorial (1968), a large installation or, more precisely, an environment created by Edward Kienholz in obvious reference to the Vietnam War.
Daniel Wiener: Trojan Horses
When a natural environment is confronted with contaminants, it responds with instability and disorder. One of the byproducts of contamination is “outcrossing,” a process that allows recessive traits to migrate across a population, adding diversity and strengthening certain characteristics.
Identity in Dialogue: A Conversation with Emilie Brzezinski
Family Trees, a Hide and Seek Story, 2010. Born in Geneva, Switzerland, of Czech parents, Emilie Benes Brzezinski has lived in the United States since her childhood. Though her artistic career goes back to the early ’70s, a period in which she experimented with a variety of media, including plastic, latex, and wood fiber, she
When Words Fail: A Conversation with Peter Randall-Page
Nature provides a multifarious range of forms, held in suspended animation between the polarities of stasis and transformation. Peter Randall-Page offers a Neoplatonic view of the world through his work, linking these forms in order to explore analogies between seemingly unrelated phenomena.
Michael Jones McKean and the Set of All Things
In 2011, Michael Jones McKean began a series of segmented low-relief sculptures whose titles suggest an unnerving, impossible, but seductive universality. Each work is designated by a categorical term preceded by “the”—The Republic, The Religion, The Folklore, The Comedy, The Garden—singly and collectively referencing the human effort to interpret, theorize, associate, narrate, classify, and collate.
Paulina Webb: Rational Passions
The Buenos Aires-born sculptor Paulina Webb produces a great variety of work. After graduating from the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredón and the National College of Fine Arts Ernesto de la Carcova, she completed her studies with a specialization in combined artistic languages at the National Institute of Arts, and she now teaches
Huang Zhen: Building the Image
On my recent travels to Beijing, I have looked for good young sculptors, but I have been mostly disappointed. A visit to the huge sculpture studio at the Central Academy of Fine Arts (CAFA), acknowledged as China’s best art school, convinced me of the technical skill of the students, who were working on a copy
My Body Is Your Vehicle: A Conversation with Janine Antoni
Is it possible to touch something with sight, to feel something deeply in a total state of awareness? For Janine Antoni, creative process takes on a psychological disposition. She creates objects with an intense admiration of life, in which her body is your vehicle, a fulcrum of perception, in which senses are enabled through corporeal
Shayne Dark: Transformational States
Since the late 1990s, following experimental works in mediums as diverse as pottery, cement, plastic, cast metal, and glass, Canadian artist Shayne Dark has gained considerable attention for sculptures that he creates using elements found in nature—specifically, locally sourced branches, limbs, roots, and trunks of trees.
