When the staff at the J. Paul Getty Museum invited Jim Dine to visit the Getty Villa and develop a contemporary work related to the collection, they may have been expecting a suite of drawings. Although Dine began his career by creating Happenings in New York City during the late ’50s, since the ’80s, he
Adam Walls: Animated Steel
Adam Walls’s intimate engagement with steel links the divergent forms of his work. His sculptural output moves back and forth along a fairly broad spectrum of possibilities. At one end is the manipulation of raw steel into human-scaled, simplified forms, unfinished and left to rust (Mother and Child, Figures, Rings I and II).
Mary Early: Complexity in Simplicity
Mary Early views her spare configurations as records of objects, spaces, and impressions. While these sculptural distillations bear traces of things seen and remembered, they upend expectations, giving their own version of the truth as it might apply to appearances, materials, and processes.
Guerra de la Paz: Re-Fabricating Fashion
The two artists collectively known as Guerra de la Paz both began their careers as painters. Known today as sculptors who also create installations, they still maintain a connection with their history. While form and composition are important elements of their pieces, color takes precedence above all else.
Subtle Power: Alfredo Jaar’s Recent Installations and Permanent Public Interventions
Alfredo Jaar’s body of work continues to be widely discussed in terms of the theory and politics of images. He often critiques the use and ownership of well-known photographs and raises topics largely ignored by the media.
Isa Genzken: Balancing Beauty and Brutality
Mannequins in thrift-store finery, backsides blackened with spray paint, are propped in an overturned warehouse trolley. Another mannequin lies on its back, hands in plastic mitts, neck strangled with a cheap tie, and face smothered by an overturned vase strapped in place with gingham ribbons.
Raquel Rabinovich: Fluid Equilibrium
Raquel Rabinovich, an Argentine-born artist who has lived and worked in New York and the Hudson River Valley for several years, is possessed by a kind of fluidity associated with Borges—a writer to whom many contemporary Argentine artists have been compared—as well as with the pragmatic Enlightenment philosopher John Locke.
John Grade: Anticipating and Letting Go
John Grade’s spring show at Cynthia-Reeves Gallery gave a good sense of the scope of his thinking, especially following his introduction to New York audiences a few weeks earlier, when he won the $10,000 Willard L.
Forms Behaving in Time: A Conversation with David Nash
Immersed in the sensibilities of wood, David Nash has a highly developed understanding of the complexities underlying tree growth. His longstanding base at Capel Rhiw in Blaenau Ffestiniog, north Wales, provides the launch pad for his projects, many of which take him across the globe.
Draping and Shaping Wood: A Conversation with Ursula von Rydingsvard
Ursula von Rydingsvard’s recent and upcoming exhibitions—commissions for the North Carolina Museum of Art and Storm King Art Center, large new work at New York’s Galerie LeLong, and a 35-year retrospective at the SculptureCenter in 2011—demonstrate that her new work writhes, twists, leaps, and otherwise moves in ways that wood has never moved before.
