NEW YORK Matthew Marks Just how do the artists get plastic to look like plaster, to resemble the swipe of a brush, the scuff of a shoe, a half-cleaned bowl? By separating looking from the physicality of touch and form from function or purpose, these handmade things can only affirm their authenticity as sculptural objects.
Hilary Heron
DUBLIN Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA) There has been little research on Heron, which is surprising because she was the key figure in introducing Modernism to Ireland, alerting Irish sculptors to the glories of British 20th-century sculpture (not only Epstein, Moore, and Hepworth, but also postwar figures such as Armitage, Chadwick, Turnbull, Meadows, and Frink).
Olivia Bax
SALISBURY, U.K. New Art Centre, Roche Court Sculpture Park Bax does not represent the exterior of things; instead, she presents experiences from the inside. Given this context, her internal/external armatures make perfect sense. This is the experience of the body from the inside out in all its rawness and vulnerability.
“These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture”
BRISTOL, U.K. Royal West of England Academy Hybridity has been a feature of British sculpture for decades. In the 1960s, it took two forms: transnational, epitomized by Anthony Caro’s formalist sculpture seen mostly in the context of American painting, and transmedial, characterized by an avid blurring of boundaries between painting and sculpture.
Hany Armanious
LEEDS, U.K. Henry Moore Institute The exhibition title, “Stone Soup,” is taken from a folk tale in which a traveler concocts a cauldron of soup, at first from nothing, yet, by employing the art of trickery, ensures an entire village is fed. This sparse show performs a similar act of conceptual magic.
Marie Watt
AUSTIN Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin These abstract, cloud-like forms consciously evoke another traditional story, this one from the Coast Salish tribe, in which the Coast Salish (joined by many other tribes, all speaking different languages) collectively unified to push the collapsing sky back up into its rightful place.
Delaine Le Bas
GLASGOW Tramway Through an interweaving of textiles, embroidery, painting, collage, costume, soundscapes, installation, and performance, Le Bas draws on her British Romani heritage to survey centuries-old outsider tropes, fears, and witch hunts, frequently gesturing toward stereotypes directed at Romani, Gypsy, and Traveler peoples.
Oren Pinhassi
NEW YORK Lehmann Maupin Constructed through a distinctive process of layering sand over burlap-wrapped steel armatures, these faceless geometric/anthropomorphic structures defy consistency of form, yet each one stands on a base of toed “feet” that resemble soft talons gripping a stone.
Ibrahim Mahama
EDINBURGH Fruitmarket In what amounts to a palimpsest of ideas and materials, Mahama brings scraps and fragments salvaged from the German-built Henschel trains used on the railway together into contemporary works that evoke something of the mental and physical anguish of that history, transplanting it into a gallery that appropriately sits atop a major arterial railway station.
Ho Tzu Nyen
SINGAPORE Singapore Art Museum Ho Tzu Nyen’s recent exhibition “Time & the Tiger” foregrounded the slippery relation between sculpture and film—two seemingly contradictory media—playing up cinematic form with a sculptural attention to the means of presentation.
