According to South African critic Amy Halliday, contemporary art from the African continent is “often either excluded from, or uncomfortably assimilated into, an overarching Western narrative.” Nicholas Hlobo, a young South African sculptor, mined this narrative for his 2008 installation at Boston’s Institute of Contemporary Art, where his work was featured as part of the
How to Have Courage: A Conversation with Michelle Lopez
“The Violent Bear It Away,” Michelle Lopez’s 2009 exhibition at Simon Preston Gallery in New York, featured three new sculptures, each masking a subtext of terrorist warfare and exploring an abject form of violence and entropy.
Doubts and Hopes: A Conversation with Kent Karlsson
Dreams, memories, politics, history, and religion inform the work of Kent Karlsson. The Swedish artist incorporates everyday objects and iconic images into sculptures created through an exploration and refinement of his own poetic visual language. Karlsson works out of his hometown studio in Gothenburg, on the west coast of Sweden.
Uniting Form, Content, and Context: Mona Hatoum at the Rennie Collection
The context of an artwork is critical to its experience. In the case of Mona Hatoum’s recent exhibition at the Rennie Collection, the context was two-fold. First, the works, representing 15 years of the artist’s oeuvre, were installed so that they resonated with the gallery spaces.
Drew Daly: Visual Friction
For Drew Daly, life has been a series of repetitive gestures: first, at age 14, as a baker’s assistant lining up loaves of bread, later as a scholarship swimmer perfecting his stroke, then as a production potter producing cup after identical cup, bowl after bowl.
Ted Victoria: Only the Object is Real
Last Halloween, new tenants—multi-limbed, vermin-like aliens with transparent bodies—moved into the 1783 Old Façade Building of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. The three-story administration building, its windows aglow with swarming creatures, provided the setting for Infestation, an installation by New York artist Ted Victoria.
The Work is Space and Energy: A Conversation with Marco Gastini
Marco Gastini’s work induces an emotional state comparable to what you feel in front of the sea—engrossed by a mysterious, silent, slow dynamism, overwhelmed by its energy. This concept comes from Rudi Fuchs, and it is so precise that I want to borrow it to introduce Gastini’s work.
Objects, But Only Just: A Conversation with Karla Black
Naomi Wolf tells us in The Beauty Myth that “women’s identity must be premised upon our ‘beauty’ so that we will remain vulnerable to outside approval, carrying the vital sensitive organ of self-esteem exposed to the air.”
Ilan Averbuch: Between the Intimate and the Monumental
Every art form conveys a specific sense of human nature, and there is a bond between sculpture and the surging sensation of monumentality, of our belief in our own grandeur. But the monumental does not merely, perhaps not even primarily, demarcate human pride, the feeling of our importance to a universe that needs to be
Greg Johns: Acknowledging the Land
For many artists, their most recent work is the most important; past production fades in significance. Not so with Greg Johns. In spite of basic changes in style over the course of his career, he is quite prepared to return to and develop earlier concepts.
