BRUSSELS Mendes Wood DM
Best known for freestanding and hanging sculptures made from found and gifted fabric, thread, and wire, Gomes was born in Caetanópolis, a center for the Brazilian textile industry.
Olga Jevrić
LONDON PEER
Bucking Soviet-style Socialist Realism, Jevrić created abstract structures consisting of bulky forms that seem to float in space, held by nails or metal rods, which serve both to support and to trap. These works made her a pioneer in Yugoslavia as she developed her own vocabulary through the juxtaposition of mass and void, solidity and weightlessness, lines and curves.
Bernar Venet
NEW YORK Kasmin
It’s vocabulary that reminds us how mathematics and philosophy like to orbit one another. Finite and infinite, rational and irrational, predictable and unpredictable, determinate and indeterminate—these are crucial complements to French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, who employs indeterminacy as both a mathematical concept and a philosophical guidepost.
Christopher Miles
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA College of Creative Studies Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara The nine dramatic structures constituting “In Form” so agitate their surroundings that they create a distinct atmosphere independent of the space itself. Animated, highly detailed, penetrated with holes, tube-like parts, glossy excrescences, and contrasts between interior and exterior, they demand an engaged, committed process of examination.
Hans Op de Beeck
NEW YORK Marianne Boesky Gallery The uncanny quality of the show stemmed from the exacting observation that Op de Beeck applies to his matte-gray human figures and their interior settings, which appear as if frozen in time.
Ruth Asawa
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Pulitzer Arts Foundation While “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” did not present her life experience idealistically, her creative, ethical response to her experience and her tenacious devotion to labor became almost transcendent models of work-arounds for obstruction.
Francis Upritchard
LONDON Barbican Centre Referencing an Iron Age burial site in the north of England, Francis Upritchard’s impressive exhibition, “Wetwang Slack,” announced from the outset that archaeology would be an underlying theme. But this was no dry, bleached-out display of indistinguishable artifacts such as have tried the patience of school children for generations.
Mike Nelson
LONDON Tate Britain The development of sculpture through the 20th century was made possible, in part, by the development of increasingly sophisticated machinery, and The Asset Strippers expounds that interdependent relationship.
Tara Donovan
DENVER Museum of Contemporary Art Denver Some of the more recent pieces in “Fieldwork,” Donovan’s recent mid-career retrospective, lacked the aesthetic beauty of her early work with translucent materials like plastic cups. Yet the impact of an elephantine installation amassed from gray file cards is thunderous, as powerful as banyan tree roots, mythical monsters, or the mountains of Huangshan.
David Rabinowitch
TOKYO Ikeda Gallery The relationship between David Rabinowitch’s sculptures and works on paper is multifaceted. His drawings can be directly linked to his three-dimensional metal fabrications, exist independently of them, or hover somewhat restlessly between the two realms.
