LONDON Whitechapel Gallery Though Gates is revealed as artist, educator, collector, curator, and shaman/preacher, this is not an exhibition about an individual: every object, down to the humblest brick, has a rich story, and Gates thrillingly connects us to each one and to their makers across millennia.
Erin Shirreff
NEW YORK Sikkema Jenkins & Co. Without passing judgment on the restless images that have proliferated around us, Shirreff examines and mobilizes what she calls the “space of not-knowing”—the missing information inherent in any photograph.
Carl D’Alvia
NEW YORK Hesse Flatow D’Alvia’s abstract sculptures, while giving the impression of being completely contemporary, fuse popular culture and a formalism that originated generations ago, when high culture often entered public awareness through a rebellious appreciation of form.
Nastassia Kotava
DETROIT Spaysky Fine Art Gallery Mail art and monumental sculpture typically inhabit very different positions within the universe of art, power, and politics. In The Head (Yakub Kolas For Detroit), Paris-based, Belarusian artist Nastassia Kotava delivers a provocative mash-up of the two forms.
“In Search of the Miraculous”
NEW YORK The FLAG Art Foundation While Rider offers an antidote of sorts to our collective trauma—we could all use a little magic—the title acquires an extra dash of poignancy in its homage to the conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader and his final project of the same name: the solo crossing of the Atlantic in a tiny pocket vessel, from which he never returned.
Beverly Buchanan
NEW YORK Andrew Edlin Gallery “Shacks and Legends, 1985–2011,” a recent mini-retrospective that also included works on paper and photographs, made a strong case for entering Buchanan (1940–2015) into the contemporary canon.
Sean Lynch
EDINBURGH Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop Rather than become embroiled in a “should it stay or should it go” brawl over the monument’s future, Lynch shifted eyes away from what he describes as “the egotistical grandeur” of city monuments in a small but busy exhibition in one of ESW’s courtyard studios.
Paul S. Briggs
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS Lucy Lacoste Gallery At a time when irony is a mainstream aesthetic force and the art object is frequently made coherent via the glitter of popular culture, work such as Briggs’s is rare and strangely daring. Abstraction becomes a visual manifestation of poetry, bearing literary notions of metaphor and symbolism.
Pia Camil
LOS ANGELES Blum & Poe Pia Camil’s work has consistently engaged ideas of power, consumerism, and collectivity, using the mass-market waste of Mexico City’s urban landscape to create theoretically complex objects and participatory installations. Her new body of work, produced after she relocated from the city to the rural countryside during the pandemic, takes these themes in a different direction.
Sarah Sze
MOUNTAINVILLE, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Sarah Sze’s Fallen Sky—Storm King’s first permanent commissioned outdoor sculpture since Maya Lin installed Storm King Wavefield in 2008—resembles a silhouetted planet earth, as if photographed from space. Composed of 130 polished steel fragments nestled into native grasses, it occupies the site where a large tree once stood.
