WATERLOO, CANADA Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery The marriage of porcelain and a tire iron sounds conventionally surrealistic, but Laurent Craste’s work is much more subversive than that. In the Montreal-based artist’s current exhibition “Impertinent Abstractions,” (on view through January 5, 2025), the very medium of his work—clay—comes under attack.
Grant Mooney
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University “calcis,” Grant Mooney’s current exhibition, features sculptures that challenge our assumptions about materiality by exploring the enmeshment of the organic and industrial.
“Around the Table”
WASHINGTON, DC de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University What struck me most about “Around the Table” was the limited presence of food as material and image, a surprising approach for a show exploring food as a social connector. But curator Vesela Sretenović makes a strong case for her conceptual focus on global threads associated with sharing, including patterns of consumption and labor.
Phyllida Barlow
SOMERSET, U.K. Hauser & Wirth Over the course of a long career, Phyllida Barlow consistently challenged the possibilities of making with pieces that were experimental, audacious, and even seemingly impossible.
Nicole Havekost
MINNEAPOLIS Dreamsong Nicole Havekost’s new drawings and sculptures demonstrate that, sometimes, complexity manifests most richly and strangely on the surface of things. Suturing, pricking, encrusting, sprinkling, saturating, slicing, waxing, burnishing, matting, and perforating are among the mark-making actions these works have sustained.
Tarik Kiswanson
GLASGOW The Common Guild As [Kiswanson] moves “outwards,” he addresses wider realities of humanity, using a variety of strategies to explore ideas around what he has called the “constant instability” of identity, and the embedded narratives and meaning that objects can hold.
Rachel Mica Weiss
NEW YORK Carvalho Park “Cyclicalities”—Rachel Mica Weiss’s most materially and thematically ambitious exhibition to date—features nine new sculptures that transform marble, alabaster, concrete, glass, and stainless steel from their everyday, utilitarian usage into things more softly meditative.
Wynnie Mynerva
LONDON Gathering Monumental unframed paintings on fabric are suspended from the walls of the ground floor and basement galleries, stretched out to a large extent, but with volumes of fabric tumbling downward and (sometimes) outward like fleshy folds.
“You Don’t Know Me”
WOOLWICH, MAINE Sarah Bouchard Gallery That there are only objects on view, and that they are tools of creative, domestic, and intellectual life and labor, points to an optimism, in critic Lauren Berlant’s sense of the word, about making itself.
Peter Fischli and David Weiss
NEW YORK Matthew Marks Just how do the artists get plastic to look like plaster, to resemble the swipe of a brush, the scuff of a shoe, a half-cleaned bowl? By separating looking from the physicality of touch and form from function or purpose, these handmade things can only affirm their authenticity as sculptural objects.
