Like much post-conceptual art, a new group of works by the nomadic, Italian-born Not Vital rejects explicit interpretation in favor of an open approach to meaning. These sculptures, which recall landscapes, animals, and body fragments, exist in a half-familiar, but distorted world beyond the everyday.
Arnaldo Pomodoro: Voyage Through the Labyrinth
Arnaldo Pomodoro’s most significant “sign” is personal but recognizable, though many people—including perhaps the artist himself when he began his exploration more than 50 years ago—are unable to explain its meaning. The image of the labyrinth surfaces in Pomodoro’s earliest works, including Moon, Sun, Tower (1955), Sun Nutriment (1955), Horizon (1956), and Mark (1957).
Dressing Up Sculpture: A Conversation with Pepe Mar
Pepe Mar’s sculptures pulse with vivid color and small elements—cut-up slivers of paper, tiny objects—that when assembled form quasi-creatures. The New York Times described his early exhibition “Hunga Bunga” as personifying “the visually devouring soul of modern mass media.”
Marsha Pels: Drastic Alterations and Transformations
From early 2008 to the middle of 2010, Marsha Pels spent her time as a professor of sculpture in Detroit. It was not a happy experience, neither in terms of the institution, where she established new facilities, nor in terms of the troubled city to which she had been transplanted, nor in terms of her
Live Media: Hope Sandrow
A flock of rare Paduan chickens cluck and flap in Hope Sandrow’s Open Air Studio, an installation that she created in the backyard of her century-old home in Southampton, New York. Sandrow, known for intermingling an eclectic range of media, from photography to performance, is also quick to pounce on oddball happenstance, as she did when an exotic white cockerel followed her home from a morning walk, and then stayed.
The Less Content, The Better: A Conversation with Charles Long
Charles Long lovingly stroked Pet Sounds, the music-making, pastel-colored shapes that he created for Madison Square Park, as guests at an opening night dinner awaited his arrival.
Public Art in Switzerland: Stimulating the Senses
Swiss artist Peter Regli uses a concept that he calls “reality hacking” to make short, temporary interventions into the everyday. These incredibly fleeting works happen surprisingly and without advance notice. Incidental viewers may not be certain of their perceptions.
A Line to Space: Monika Grzymala
In New York, in 2010, Monika Grzymala installed Untitled (skeleton of a drawing) at one of the entrances to the Museum of Modern Art’s major survey exhibition “On Line: Drawing through the Twentieth Century.” Balancing precariously on a boom lift above the museum’s Marron Atrium, she assembled thin sticks of lightweight, polymer modeling compound (hand-prepared
A Conversation with Allan McCollum: Mass-Producing Individual Works
Born in Los Angeles, Allan McCollum has lived and worked in New York City since 1975. He has spent more than four decades exploring how objects accrue meaning through their manufacture (the handmade versus mass-produced), modes of display, and means of exchange.
Judy Pfaff: Evolution of an Innovator
Judy Pfaff was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2014. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Lo, Laramie, 2012. Honeycomb carboard, expanded foam, plastics, and fluorescent light, 60 x 60 x 20 in Judy Pfaff’s fierce independence has put her in an exalted but precarious position.
