SEATTLE Greg Kucera Gallery While “Searching for Home” featured installations of carved wooden objects like baby pacifiers, shoes, suitcases, and guns, “Sacred Games,” Abid’s recent show, concentrated on discrete, mostly wall-mounted sculptures and miniature paintings covering a wider variety of subjects; these works intensified the sense of material construction as a vehicle for significant content, including the oppression of Muslim women and the culpability of world religions.
Tmima
GLEN COVE, NEW YORK The Museum of the Holocaust Memorial and Tolerance Center of Nassau County In “The Holocaust Through the Eyes of a Survivor’s Daughter” (on view through June 1, 2021), Tmima presents 30 emotionally shattering, mixed-media sculptures in which small, distorted figures populate ruined, apocalyptic landscapes.
Zsolt Asztalos
BUDAPEST Kiscelli Múzeum Asztalos’s video works have a compelling static quality—the light is fixed, a gaze is captured—and there is an eternal stillness, each person in a state of recollection. Asztalos captures the moment through an ineffable sensitivity to light; one feels the transition of time, of twilight or early morning, without an actual change happening in a conclusive reality.
Thaddeus Mosley
NEW YORK Karma Still making work at the age of 94, self-taught sculptor Thaddeus Mosley serves as an outstanding example of why Black Lives Matter. Although well known in the Pittsburgh area, where he has been exhibiting since 1959, his work has only recently gained a broader audience, due in part to his inclusion in the 2018 Carnegie International.
Tishan Hsu
LONG ISLAND CITY, NEW YORK SculptureCenter Hsu’s work is not a theater of science fiction but an interpretation of the present imbued with thoughts about the future. It is also a realization of his efforts to come to terms with a new biological and technical paradigm.
Monica Coyne
EUREKA, CALIFORNIA Morris Graves Museum of Art Artist and blacksmith Monica Coyne works in steel, and her sculptures are riddled with reminders of the forge. In a built environment predicated on the ready availability of prefabricated steel components, that’s enough to make them strange.
Duane Paxson
TROY, ALABAMA International Arts Center, Janice Hawkins Cultural Arts Park, Troy University At a time when sculptural craftsmanship is often subordinated to idea—and idea is at best inconsequential—it was refreshing to see an exhibition of works both beautifully made and “weighty” in thought.
Candice Lin
CLAREMONT, CALIFORNIA Pitzer College Art Galleries Candice Lin’s work involves equal measures of dark poetry, speculation, fiction, DIY science, futurism, queerness, and art history. Its concentrated physical materiality is rendered even denser by layers of association and reference.
“An exhibition with works by…”
ROTTERDAM Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art) For me, Delftware—a blue and white ceramic that rose to prominence in the 17th century—isn’t particularly sexy, but this show of sculptures and installations reinterpreting Delftware forms and presenting a wider global history changed my mind.
Jessica Stoller
NEW YORK P.P.O.W André Breton once described Frida Kahlo’s work as “a ribbon around a bomb.” His words could also apply to Jessica Stoller’s witty and subversive sculptures, which first seduce and then explode into contrary objection.