ATLANTA whitespace gallery Rachel K. Garceau’s work often begins with an intimate, near-obsessive exploration of a single object that has taken root in her imagination—it could be a stone or a branch or something ineffable about a place.
Alma Allen
NEW YORK Kasmin Allen’s works radiate a rare touch-me quality that retains the intimacy of their making—hand-sculpted in wax or clay, worked and reworked until the forms gradually emerge. The objects have correspondences, particularly to the natural world, but cannot be classified; they are both figurative and abstract, organic and geometrical.
Igshaan Adams
LONDON Hayward Gallery In the hands of Igshaan Adams, a sculpture is in endless evolution. As the South African artist explained during the opening of his current exhibition (on view through July 25, 2021), “My sculptures are a never-ending work. I add materials in different moments, and leave them aside in the studio for years at times because with my sculptures there is no intention or agenda. It is about trying out new ideas.”
Roberley Bell
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Launchpad Gallery In “Between Uncertainty,” Roberley Bell’s current exhibition (on view through July 2, 2021), floral wallpaper covers a corner of the gallery. Still Life with Table plays off the floral theme perfectly. Fanciful and provocative, the white wood and pink foam sculpture rises like a flowering bonsai with its twisted root base and puff top.
Oren Pinhassi
LONDON Edel Assanti and St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate The anthropomorphic sculptures of Israel-born, New York-based Oren Pinhassi hold up a strange, disconcerting mirror to humanity. Though vaguely like us in appearance, their forms call to mind structures built for specific functions. If a voting booth or a urinal, for instance, were to mate with a human, this is what their offspring might look like.
Coral Lambert
MINNEAPOLIS NE Sculpture Gallery|Factory Equal parts grit and fantasy, “Alternate Worlds” (on view through June 12, 2021) is Coral Lambert’s response to life in the time of a pandemic. The show consists of recent cast iron and bronze sculptures, photographs, prints, and a video projection that collectively function in the seemingly liminal space between “twilight and dreams.”
Rafael Domenech
BEIJING Hua International Cuban-American artist Rafael Domenech contends that exhibition-making is an expanded form of publishing, an active site of production. His current exhibition, “Imperfect Fragments of an Uncertain Whole” (on view through June 18, 2021), presents a multipart installation consisting of a table, handmade artist books, mobile light sculptures, and ceiling tiles, all made between 2018 and 2021, as well as a large outdoor sculpture in a nearby public square.
Andy Moerlein
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery To walk into Andy Moerlein’s “wood stone poem” (on view through June 6, 2021) is to enter a magical space, filled with fanciful and ecstatic forms stretching out in welcome. A three-foot-tall, 60-year-old Ficus retusa bonsai from Taiwan at the entrance to the exhibition offers a clue to Moerlein’s recent explorations, which continue his longtime interest in Asian art and poetry.
Theaster Gates
NEW YORK Gagosian For Theaster Gates, the gallery operates not as a place for pleasurable viewing but as a performative space of social practice focused on cultural recuperation and empowerment.
Kapwani Kiwanga
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly Kapwani Kiwanga’s recent exhibition featured three installations and a hanging cloth work—all addressing strategies of resistance, from historical slavery to the American civil rights era, to today’s anti-racist movements and demonstrations. Botany played an unexpected, and key, role in all but one of these new works, as Kiwanga drew out the histories of various plants smuggled into America by enslaved Africans.
