BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art APT9 delighted with its pageantry, featuring more than 400 pieces across mediums. Attendees of all ages and cultural backgrounds appeared appreciative, perhaps unaware of criticisms of the neo-colonial gaze presiding over such shows, as omnipresent curators crown the next “art world darlings.”
“Silent Conflicts”
NEW DELHI Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre Curator Ashna Singh, director of Studio Art Gallery in New Delhi, made a brilliant selection of 12 artists whose work differs in terms of material, medium, and vision. Yet his choices sat comfortably together, showcasing inner conflict in all its dimensions.
“Landlord Colors: On Art, Economy, and Materiality”
BLOOMFIELD HILLS, MICHIGAN Cranbrook Art Museum “Landlord Colors,” which had a slippery relationship with art history, drew from historical movements, such as Arte Povera and Dansaekhwa, but then encouraged viewers to overlay those works with a framework of materiality and the historical conditions of crisis.
Mario Merz
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.
