DUNDEE, U.K. The McManus Shaw’s large-scale sculptural forms, which take the whale’s tiny inner-ear bones as their point of reference, are made from a clay body that incorporates whale bone ash, processed much like the cow bones that have been used in bone china for centuries.
Ro Robertson
SUNDERLAND, U.K. Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art In such interstitial spaces—temporarily land and temporarily water—Robertson has found a natural corollary for their sense of self, an identity in similar motion, once condemned as being against nature.
Alberto Giacometti and Mona Hatoum
LONDON Barbican Hatoum’s deployment of geometry and abstraction transcends the specific, yet the threat of violence is always close at hand.
Jessi Reaves
MINNEAPOLIS Walker Art Center Much of the material in these works, including cotton batting, velvet, sewing pins, mink fur, and hangers, points to classic markers of the domestic feminine. But Reaves’s approach to destruction and repurposing does not completely refute these themes and tropes; instead, it feels more like an acknowledgement and remixing.
Max Hooper Schneider
NEW YORK 125 Newbury Fusing nature and artifice while highlighting metamorphosis, conversion, and collaborative practice, these sculptures recall Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic hybrid figures and exploration of alchemy and science, philosophy and religious belief.
Cosima von Bonin
LONDON Raven Row von Bonin’s installations, which combine found objects and handmade elements, retain a deliberate looseness aligned with her Cologne milieu of the 1990s—an anti-heroic sensibility that dismantles the cult of authorship, authenticity, and artistic genius.
Armando Guadalupe Cortés
BROOKLYN Smack Mellon Cortés’s work renders parrots not only as metaphors for migration and adaptability, but also as proxies for human connection.
Irma Hünerfauth
LONDON Arcadia Missa While Hünerfauth struggled with the social and political conditions of post-Nazi Germany, she also attempted to understand rising pressures on perception, community, and nature in the face of technological advancement.
Lauren Grossman
SEATTLE Traver Gallery Cocked (2020), with its cage of interlocking steel rods, summons up the classical sculptural convention of contrapposto; bending to one side, the viewer vicariously enters into dialogue with the captive figure, complete with black cast-iron ears.