NEW YORK The Met Breuer Whitten’s work richly demonstrates the notion that whatever escapes restrictions escapes categorization. Unfortunately, what escapes categorization can also escape detection.
Analia Saban
NEW YORK Tanya Bonakdar Gallery Process matters to Analia Saban. It’s in the DNA of everything she creates, inseparable from the concept germinating a specific piece and embedded in larger, evolving bodies of work.
Dispatch: Keith Sonnier
Parrish Art Museum, Dan Flavin Art Institute, and Tripoli Gallery Although celebrated in Europe, Sonnier has not had a major American museum exhibition before last year’s “Until Today” at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, New York. This retrospective, organized by Terrie Sultan, director of the Parrish, and guest curator Jeffrey Grove, showcased 39 pieces from 1967 through the present, providing a broad context for works displayed concurrently at the Dan Flavin Art Institute in Bridgehampton and Southhampton’s Tripoli Gallery.
Jessi Reaves
NEW YORK Bridget Donahue If a Noguchi glass-top coffee table was the sophisticated pride and joy of the family, Reaves’s “knockoff” version was the offbeat black sheep, with a base made of gloppy sawdust and glue or car fenders rather than carefully carved walnut.
Diana Thater
BOSTON ICA Watershed The Institute of Contemporary Art Boston launched its new exhibition space, the Watershed, last year with a large-scale exhibition of Diana Thater’s installations.
Manifesta 12
PALERMO Manifesta 12 The biennial, piggybacking on the reformers’ momentum, proceeded from mutual consultation with city officials and communities. “Manifesta 12 is not a foreign body fallen upon the city like a meteorite but the result of sharing and fostering visions, aspirations, projects, and dialogue,” the mayor later declared.
Matthew Barney
NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT Yale University Art Gallery Matthew Barney’s comprehensive and layered “Redoubt” explores themes of hunting, predation, guns, voyeurism, dance, landscape politics, metallurgy, and transformation through a unique take on the myth of Diana and Actaeon.
John Bisbee
ROCKLAND, MAINE Center for Maine Contemporary Art “For the first time in my life, I’m doing basically three things that I have mocked my entire adult creative career—realism, political satire, and text,” Bisbee says. The show’s title is itself a capacious metaphor that embraces a multitude of references, including American labor, economics, and culture.
Fawn Krieger
NEW YORK Assembly Room Fawn Krieger’s “Soft Power” inaugurated the new Assembly Room, a gallery run by curators Natasha Becker, Paola Gallio, and Yulia Topchiy with the mission to celebrate and empower independent women curators. “Soft power” typically describes a technique of using cultural and economic persuasion, rather than military coercion, to achieve political ends.
Magali Hébert-Huot
WASHINGTON, DC Hamiltonian Gallery Isolation and estrangement, tinged with a dark humor, haunt a long, narrow gallery where sculptures lie about like remnants of a forgotten journey or stage props awaiting human agents. Magali Hébert-Huot has cloaked them in white for the most part, pops of acid green and pink disrupting the palette of oblivion and challenging gender conventions.
