HELSINKI Forum Box After years of producing wall-dependent compositions—works that resemble hangings, misaligned Venetian blinds, wooden screens, and rows of exposed pipes—Elina Autio has turned to the floor. While the departure seems unexpected, these new works also recall furnishings, specifically small tables or beds, and closely relate to earlier projects.
Nicole Eisenman
NEW YORK Madison Square Park Nicole Eisenman, in her artist statement for Fixed Crane, muses about the ways that an urban landscape might sustain the mental and physical health of its citizens, imagining a future in which open-air green markets, public pools, dog runs, community greenhouses, and affordable housing would replace luxury apartment buildings.
Jean Tinguely
MILAN Pirelli HangarBicocca There is a balletic quality to many of the works, as their constituent parts twist, turn, ascend, and descend, accompanied by aural cacophony.
Barry Le Va
EDINBURGH Fruitmarket Viewing the work of Barry Le Va (1941–2021) requires a lot of looking down. While that may seem an obvious point to make regarding an artist for whom the gallery floor was a site of exploration, and a performance space for staging sculptural dramas, it also applies, metaphorically at least, to his beautifully minimal drawings.
Whitfield Lovell
SAN ANTONIO McNay Art Museum This is a large suite of gallery spaces, and Lovell fills it comfortably with fastidiously rendered drawings that push out into three dimensions. His work is at once visual, auditory, and even olfactory.
Laurent Craste
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.
