MILAN Pirelli HangarBicocca HangarBicocca does things with an incredible monumentality, and under the stewardship of Vicente Todolí, the scale appears to have gone through the roof. Last year, the aircraft-hangar-size space hosted works by Mario Merz, which still appear as alien as they do innovative.
David Hammons
LOS ANGELES Hauser & Wirth The enigmatic press release for Hammons’s recent exhibition contains only the words “This exhibition is dedicated to / Ornette / Coleman / Harmolodic Thinker / David Hammons,” superimposed over a freeform drawing of squiggled, wavering horizontal and vertical lines. The press release not only set the tone for this sprawling, theatrical show, it also manifested Hammons’s total control over the display and public presentation of his work within the context of one of the world’s most powerful galleries.
Carel Visser
THE HAGUE Museum Beelden aan Zee The survey demonstrated that Visser (1928–2015), one of the Netherlands’ most important 20th-century sculptors, was guided by a deep-seated need to make things, that he employed a remarkably diverse range of themes, materials, and techniques to actualize his ideas and observations, and that he rarely—if ever—acquiesced to artistic trends.
Carl Lee
BROOKLYN Undercurrent Gallery “Myoptic,” a sculptural video installation by Carl Lee, contemplated the intricate twining of spectatorship, memory, and technology. The title, a play on the word “myopic,” strongly underscores this notion: “myopic” means nearsighted, not being able to see the wider view without some sort of corrective lens; “myoptic” seems to indicate a more personal spectatorship, the nostalgic lens through which we each, individually, experience the past.
Lydia Okumura
LONDON Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Okumura has stated that “geometry is an intelligent way to express the concept of multi-dimensionality, an aspect of the truth of life.” This exhibition therefore provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the intricate multi-dimensionality of a group of five key sculptures from the 1984 show, which exemplified a decisive year in her artistic trajectory.
Brendan Fernandes
CHICAGO Monique Meloche Brendan Fernandes’s new works cast bondage in bronze. His current exhibition, “Restrain” (on view through January 11, 2020), features bronze coils suspended by leather straps from live-edge walnut supports. Titles inject context, connecting these looping suspensions to the formations of kinbaku, or “tight binding,” the Japanese practice of aestheticized bondage.
Simone Leigh in New York
Like the braided clay that adorns some of her ceramic sculptures, Leigh’s practice articulates a richly interwoven narrative of recuperation, resistance, restitution, and healing that directly addresses this core viewership even as it puts the broader public on notice.
“Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now”
PARIS Fondation Cartier
Thomas Delamarre, senior curator for the Fondation Cartier, didn’t know what he would learn when he visited 200 European artists who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How, he wondered, did the still politically charged landscape of today shape their perspectives and impact their work?
Echiko Ohira
LOS ANGELES Craft Contemporary For me, the hallmarks of singularity in an art object are to be found in certain manifested obsessions, idiosyncratic techniques, and animating tensions. Echiko Ohira’s complexly reductive works declare that singularity by way of a compulsive tropism toward simple, repetitive, labor-intensive techniques.
“Alice, Neeme & Jass”
HELSINKI Kunsthalle Helsinki
The unassuming title could not have been any more paradoxical, effectively belying the vitality of the work created by Alice Kask, Neeme Külm, and Jass Kaselaan, three Estonian artists. Their objects not only played off each other, but also responded astutely to the spaces in which they were set.
