NORTHERN IRELAND Down County Museum Assembled from cardboard or mountboard (most of it taken from the bases of fruit and vegetable boxes), the small forms were then collaged with found, painted, and drawn images and written commentary. Though these “building blocks” may recall simple children’s toys, they also contain a very strong sociopolitical axis that demands to be “read.”
Otobong Nkanga
DALLAS Nasher Sculpture Center Along the cord’s length, there is a rhythmic evolution to the colors: one section dark and earthen like compost, becoming a stringy, mottled cream, then a beetroot purple, studded with seeds. It is also punctuated by a number of enormous, milky glass beads in analogous colors. From afar this gives the form the look of an oversize rosary.
Gabriel Orozco
MEXICO CITY Museo Jumex “Politécnico Nacional,” Gabriel Orozco’s first museum show in Mexico since 2006 and his most expansive survey to date, presents the work of a global artist who nevertheless remains emblematic of Mexico City’s contemporary art scene.
Alberto Giacometti and Huma Bhabha
LONDON Barbican Hovering somewhere between human and non-human, ancient and modern, the familiar and the strange, these are anti-monuments, cast in bronze from carved cork and skull fragments, their surfaces gouged and incised.
Folkert de Jong and Tild Greene
AMSTERDAM Projectspace 38/40 In some instances, we can recognize parts from everyday objects, while in others, we might incidentally mistake the sculptures for exposed MEP (mechanical, electrical, or plumbing systems) belonging to the site. The works clearly complement each other: the more subtle and abstract presence of Greene’s sculptures offsets the heavier and iconic presence of de Jong’s work.
Josh Faught
SEATTLE Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington Proceeding from conceptual art’s loaded objects, Faught has crammed and jammed pockets and slits within the woven fabric with archival queer history publications, relics, and trivia.
Ian Hamilton Finlay
LONDON Victoria Miro The intellectual weight behind the project is considerable but made infinitely pleasurable by the substance and depth of Finlay’s endeavor as a sculptor of gardens, poems, and fragments and by his use of wit and play.
David Hammons
LOS ANGELES Hauser and Wirth While both iterations have followed immense tragedy—9/11 and then the Palisades and Eaton fires—what Hammons attunes us to is not the instance of tragedy itself, but the infinitely combinatory and socially contingent conditions that inform the spaces we occupy.
Michelle Lopez and Ester Partegàs
SAN FRANCISCO Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts Both artists describe engaging in a direct dialogue with materials, without preconceived ideas of the outcome. Lopez has talked about the pleasure she derives from the experiences engendered by such directness—the physicality of exerting force, finding form through interaction.
Richard Shaw and Reniel Del Rosario
SAN RAFAEL, CALIFORNIA Marin Museum of Contemporary Art As described by Natasha Boas, co-curator with MOCA director Jodi Roberts, part of the impulse behind the exhibition was the “idea of artistic transmission and influence across generations.” The show also investigates how the tangled messes of our everyday lives can engender transcendent art.
