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.
Whatever It Takes To Get It Made: A Conversation with Orly Genger
For “Material World,” a group exhibition at MASS MoCA exploring how artists can create extraordinary environments out of ordinary things, Orly Genger knotted, stacked, and painted 100 miles of lobster rope to form a monumental sculpture that bursts through the architecture and falls into riotous spills with all the intensity of a parted red sea.
Danville Chadbourne: The Suspension of Age
Fusing Modernism with elements of tribal art, San Antonio artist Danville Chadbourne has created a vast, sprawling world of work that uses simple organic shapes to evoke psychological and spiritual states. His serene sculptures resemble the relics and totems of a lost or unknown civilization, combining a modern aesthetic with primitive materials, mostly clay, wood,
Mária Lugossy: From Public to Private
Since the fall of communism in Hungary in 1989, Mária Lugossy has been at the forefront of a public art revolution. Discriminated against because she would not join the Communist Party, she flouted pre-1989 authority with glass, bronze, and stone sculptures that treated proto-feminist themes such as the origins of life, conception, and birth, as
Nola Jones: Premonitions of Another World
Sydney-based Nola Jones has been making sculpture for five decades now. Her work of the last five or six years represents a striking synthesis whose eclecticism is vividly alive. In her current series of totemic columns, she places separate elements on top of each other.
Gelah Penn: Surface Tensions
Gelah Penn’s approach to sculpture is distinctly existential in character. In a career trajectory that moved across the country and back, from painting to sculpture, to drawing-like forms installed in architectural space, her progress as an artist has been driven by conscious decisions to step outside of convention.
Margaret Meehan: Certainty Short-Circuted
Whether full-blown installations or succinct sculptures, Margaret Meehan’s works embrace a unique sense of narrative. In a retroactive turn of media, applying filmic concerns to the sculptural, they seem like stills taken from longer stories. Meehan’s installation Innocence and Otherness (featured in “Pretty Baby,” a 2007 Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth exhibition examining the
Liam Gillick: Deferrals and Detours / Discussions and Documentaries
Entering into Liam Gillick’s “Three perspectives and a short scenario” was like diving into a heavily footnoted seminar presentation. The single large exhibition space was dark, divided into sections and hallways by 10-foot-high slatted screens and dark gray industrial carpeting.
Robert Melee: The Magnetic Grotesque
During the summer of 2009, four large-scale bronze sculptures by Robert Melee bubbled to life in New York’s City Hall Park, their rough accretions materialized into hulking masses. Oozing rivulets of multi-colored enamel paint like queasy marbleizing, these abstract forms appeared extravagantly slimed or covered with flowing wounds.
Fierceness and Fragility: A Conversation with Leslie Dill
Lesley Dill’s sculptures made an impression on me some years ago at Graphic Studio in Tampa, particularly a tea-stained, paper dress that popped outward to become three-dimensional. A large traveling exhibition of her work—recently shown at the Saint Petersburg Museum of Fine Arts and on view at the Columbia Museum of Art in South Carolina
