To enter Cliff Garten’s Venice studio is to encounter a visual dialectic of public and private that speaks to our times. On one wall is Being and Home, an impressive suite of 10 independent sculptures depicting living creatures, all meticulously rendered in different materials; on the other wall are images of the artist’s large-scale, collaborative
Dangerous Structures: A Conversation with Alice Aycock
With an encyclopedic quest for knowledge that seeks no iconic style, Alice Aycock mines the universe for all that is primeval, intuitive, technological, and irrational. Spinning millennial layers into whorls of complex structures, she asks: What’s life all about?
Making the Bridge Breathe: A Conversation with Douglas Hollis
Douglas Hollis’s three San Francisco studio spaces reflect the dimensions of his increasingly complex, collaborative public art. A square room dominated by computer monitors could be an architect’s office. The small downstairs shop is neatly gridded with what used to be familiar hand tools.
Color as Material: A Conversation with Tilman
Tilman is definitely an artist’s artist. I first encountered his two-dimensional, non-objective work about 10 years ago while staying at the Center for Contemporary Non-Objective Art (CCNOA) in Brussels, where he was the artistic director. I grew quite fond of his “Tilman sandwiches”—layered horizontal stacks of painted materials that began his shift toward objects.
Robert Lobe: Nature as Effigy
The New York City Department of Parks and Recreation’s public art program has consistently fostered the creation and installation of temporary public art throughout the five boroughs. Robert Lobe recently joined a long list of distinguished artists who have exhibited in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, among them, Roxy Paine and Mark di Suvero.
A Conversation with Zimoun: With and Between Contradictions
Zimoun combines ordinary objects (including cardboard boxes, plastic bags, and old furniture) with mechanical components (such as dc-motors, wires, microphones, speakers, and ventilators) to create extraordinary hybrid sculptures that fuse the normative order of generative systems with the disorder of random events.
Ghosts of Things: A Conversation with Diana Al-Hadid
Diana Al-Hadid was born in Aleppo, Syria, spent most of her childhood in Ohio, and lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Her most recent work draws inspiration from sources as varied as Renaissance tapestries, with their unusual spatial tensions, Jacopo Pontormo’s strange fresco of the Visitation in the atrium of SS.
Not Vital’s Recent Sculpture: Forms That Speak Through One Another
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.”
