LOS ANGELES Nicodim Gallery All fantasy, all good theater, requires some suspension of disbelief, a surrender to the moment. Total acceptance of what lies before us is what gives works of art their undeniable power. Isabelle Albuquerque’s work induces that suspension of disbelief, conjuring meaning from metaphor, innuendo, and metamorphosis.
“Figures on a Ground: Perspectives on Minimal Art”
BRUSSELS Fondation CAB Though the matter-of-fact tone of the title correlates with Minimalism’s cool presence, this survey thwarted such stolid frankness by presenting content as unanticipated as it was exemplary.
Richard Hunt
CHICAGO The Art Institute of Chicago Richard Hunt’s career trajectory reads like a modern-day version of a Baroque-era prodigy’s story. In 1957, while he was a student at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC), the Museum of Modern Art purchased one of his works. Soon after, his sculptures were on display at the Whitney, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago.
Yane Calovski
HELSINKI Kohta Pinpointing the intentions behind “Personal Object,” Skopje-based Yane Calovski’s arresting exhibition of heterogeneous works ranging widely across materials and possible subjects, proved challenging. The difficulties became immediately evident in Embroidery (2020), a striking and expansive painted wood sculpture.
Humaira Abid
SEATTLE Greg Kucera Gallery While “Searching for Home” featured installations of carved wooden objects like baby pacifiers, shoes, suitcases, and guns, “Sacred Games,” Abid’s recent show, concentrated on discrete, mostly wall-mounted sculptures and miniature paintings covering a wider variety of subjects; these works intensified the sense of material construction as a vehicle for significant content, including the oppression of Muslim women and the culpability of world religions.
Tmima
GLEN COVE, NEW YORK The Museum of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County In “The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Survivor’s Daughter” (on view through June 1, 2021), Tmima presents 30 emotionally shattering, mixed-media sculptures in which small, distorted figures populate ruined, apocalyptic landscapes.
Zsolt Asztalos
BUDAPEST Kiscelli Múzeum Asztalos’s video works have a compelling static quality—the light is fixed, a gaze is captured—and there is an eternal stillness, each person in a state of recollection. Asztalos captures the moment through an ineffable sensitivity to light; one feels the transition of time, of twilight or early morning, without an actual change happening in a conclusive reality.
Thaddeus Mosley
NEW YORK Karma Still making work at the age of 94, self-taught sculptor Thaddeus Mosley serves as an outstanding example of why Black Lives Matter. Although well known in the Pittsburgh area, where he has been exhibiting since 1959, his work has only recently gained a broader audience, due in part to his inclusion in the 2018 Carnegie International.
Tishan Hsu
LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK SculptureCenter Hsu’s work is not a theater of science fiction but an interpretation of the present imbued with thoughts about the future. It is also a realization of his efforts to come to terms with a new biological and technical paradigm.
Monica Coyne
EUREKA, CALIFORNIA Morris Graves Museum of Art Artist and blacksmith Monica Coyne works in steel, and her sculptures are riddled with reminders of the forge. In a built environment predicated on the ready availability of prefabricated steel components, that’s enough to make them strange.
