NEW YORK Salomon Contemporary “Be All You Can’t Be,” Michael Combs’s first solo exhibition in New York, featured a white elephant in the middle of the room. Standing atop a delicate, hand-carved pillow, the creature (cast from a rubber toy, then enhanced to resemble a charging bull), is small in size but symbolically huge.
Brian Wall
SAN FRANCISCO Hackett | Mill Gallery The tradition of Constructivism is still with us and remains especially strong in the San Francisco Bay Area with two outstanding sculptors—Brian Wall and Fletcher Benton. Wall, whose early work was recently shown in Hackett | Mill Gallery’s “Brian Wall: Spatial Planes 1957– 1966,” was born in London in 1931 and moved to St. Ives in 1954, where he became an assistant to Barbara Hepworth the following year.
John Grade
ATLANTA Emory University John Grade’s Piedmont Divide installations at Emory University inhabited two very different areas of the campus. A constantly moving curtain of hundreds of individual parts was suspended over the Quadrangle, a grassy, tree-filled space briskly inhabited by students, faculty, dog walkers, and pecan gatherers.
Dianna Frid
CHICAGO devening projects + editions Five hundred years ago, Albrecht Dürer created a vivid woodcut of a rhinoceros not from first-hand observation but from hearsay. Now that we’ve closed the gap between the exotic and the observable, one can use Dürer’s method to describe the world retroactively.
William Dennisuk
INDIANAPOLIS White River State Park, The Herron School of Art and Design William Dennisuk’s vessels designed for outdoor display and his works meant for indoor exhibition were recently seen in tandem for the first time.
Esther Kläs
NEW YORK Peter Blum Chelsea Esther Kläs came to New York for graduate studies at Hunter College, and it looks like she is determined to stay. This is to the city’s advantage, for Kläs is an excellent practitioner of postmodern sculpture, a genre that offers considerable freedom and a respite from the burdens of traditional art.
“Factory Installed 2011”
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory In 2006, the Mattress Factory introduced a new exhibition series devoted to site-specific work.
Matt Sellars
SEATTLE Platform Gallery Seattle-based Matt Sellars is known in the Northwest for meticulously carved minimal forms that suggest structures no longer in their prime.
Micha Ullman
JERUSALEM The Israel Museum This impressive retrospective brought together 40 of Micha Ullman’s sculptures selected from different periods in his 50-year career.
