NEW YORK Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Freestanding sculptures and wall pieces by John Chamberlain filled the Guggenheim Museum’s four floors last spring, offering viewers a posthumous survey of the artist’s crumpled steel and crushed metal sculptures from the past 40 years. His unique approach to sculpture began in 1957, when he took material from an antique car belonging to Larry Rivers and drove over it, as he told Julie Sylvester in a 1991 interview published in a Pace Gallery catalogue.
Nancy Selvage
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery The retinal dazzle of Op Art came and went decades ago—as with many fads, it caught the eye, and then there seemed little more to say. But here it is again, mobile and in three dimensions, in the metal work of Nancy Selvage. This time, it appears to have many more possibilities.
Laura Santini
MONTREAL McCord Museum Laura Santini’s recent installation, sited within an exhibition of Innu art, consisted of a polar bear made from oyster shells collected at Montreal seafood restaurants. The project began modestly enough as Santini brought home a bag or two from each restaurant visit.
Bharti Kher
NEW YORK Hauser & Wirth Born in London, living in Delhi for 20 years, Bharti Kher creates powerful conceptual works that draw on different aspects of her personal experience. Often multivalent in presentation, her symbolic, sometimes allegorical sculptures incorporate old and new themes, enlarging myth and legend through visual tropes that engage our freer speculations.
Micah Lexier and Kelly Mark
OSHAWA, CANADA Robert McLaughlin Gallery Words, numbers, and signatures—the hallmarks of the art world as it is measured—formed the conceptual basis of this show pairing works by two Nova Scotia College of Art and Design graduates. Like the two television screens that face each other in The Kiss (Light Box) (2009), Micah Lexier and Kelly Mark are conceptual artists who complement each other brilliantly.
Julianne Swartz
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Is it possible for an exhibition that includes blocks of cast cement to be too subtle? In her retrospective “How Deep Is Your,” Julianne Swartz worked primarily with gossamer, mirrors, sound, clockworks, and magnets, in addition to cement. It was not an installation for the hurried visitor, nor for the hard of hearing or for those with difficulty seeing.
2012 Whitney Biennial
NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art The 2012 Whitney Biennial was a modest affair. Whether by choice or necessity, this economy of means resulted in a refreshingly accessible exhibition with a personal, DIY aesthetic, one that acknowledged the downsized ambitions and reduced funding of the Great Recession while remaining intent on taking the pulse of the contemporary art world.
Cathy Wilkes
PITTSBURGH Carnegie Museum of Art Cathy Wilkes, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-’80s and then helped to fuel the city’s art scene in the 1990s, has become known for enigmatic, sometimes poignant installations fabricated from sculpted and appropriated found objects. In 2008, the Belfast-born artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in the summer of 2011, she had her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Aspen Art Museum.
David Hare
SAN FRANCISCO Weinstein Gallery The Weinstein Gallery is to be commended for bringing attention to American artists who were close to the Surrealist movement, including Enrique Donati, Gordon Onslow Ford, Jimmy Ernst, and David Hare. In today’s media-drenched culture, our recall of artists is as short-lived as our attention to political events, and Hare has been out of view for too long.
“Roundabout: Face to Face”
TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art With artists from Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Israel, “Roundabout: Face to Face” could have been an unfocused presentation. But that was not the case. Portraits and figural scenes created a sense of unity, drawing together this exhibition of 60 works (with sculpture predominating) from the 200-piece contemporary art collection of David Teplitzky.
