MILAN Pirelli HangarBicocca There is a balletic quality to many of the works, as their constituent parts twist, turn, ascend, and descend, accompanied by aural cacophony.
Barry Le Va
EDINBURGH Fruitmarket Viewing the work of Barry Le Va (1941–2021) requires a lot of looking down. While that may seem an obvious point to make regarding an artist for whom the gallery floor was a site of exploration, and a performance space for staging sculptural dramas, it also applies, metaphorically at least, to his beautifully minimal drawings.
Whitfield Lovell
SAN ANTONIO McNay Art Museum This is a large suite of gallery spaces, and Lovell fills it comfortably with fastidiously rendered drawings that push out into three dimensions. His work is at once visual, auditory, and even olfactory.
Laurent Craste
WATERLOO, CANADA Canadian Clay & Glass Gallery The marriage of porcelain and a tire iron sounds conventionally surrealistic, but Laurent Craste’s work is much more subversive than that. In the Montreal-based artist’s current exhibition “Impertinent Abstractions,” (on view through January 5, 2025), the very medium of his work—clay—comes under attack.
Grant Mooney
MIDDLETOWN, CONNECTICUT Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, Wesleyan University “calcis,” Grant Mooney’s current exhibition, features sculptures that challenge our assumptions about materiality by exploring the enmeshment of the organic and industrial.
“Around the Table”
WASHINGTON, DC de la Cruz Gallery, Georgetown University What struck me most about “Around the Table” was the limited presence of food as material and image, a surprising approach for a show exploring food as a social connector. But curator Vesela Sretenović makes a strong case for her conceptual focus on global threads associated with sharing, including patterns of consumption and labor.
Phyllida Barlow
SOMERSET, U.K. Hauser & Wirth Over the course of a long career, Phyllida Barlow consistently challenged the possibilities of making with pieces that were experimental, audacious, and even seemingly impossible.
Nicole Havekost
MINNEAPOLIS Dreamsong Nicole Havekost’s new drawings and sculptures demonstrate that, sometimes, complexity manifests most richly and strangely on the surface of things. Suturing, pricking, encrusting, sprinkling, saturating, slicing, waxing, burnishing, matting, and perforating are among the mark-making actions these works have sustained.
Tarik Kiswanson
GLASGOW The Common Guild As [Kiswanson] moves “outwards,” he addresses wider realities of humanity, using a variety of strategies to explore ideas around what he has called the “constant instability” of identity, and the embedded narratives and meaning that objects can hold.
Rachel Mica Weiss
NEW YORK Carvalho Park “Cyclicalities”—Rachel Mica Weiss’s most materially and thematically ambitious exhibition to date—features nine new sculptures that transform marble, alabaster, concrete, glass, and stainless steel from their everyday, utilitarian usage into things more softly meditative.
