VENICE Central Pavilion and Arsenale It could be said that Rugoff’s eschewal of a general theme has a Whitmanesque ambition to “contain multitudes,” letting the rooms swell with the unmediated voices of the artists, every object a megaphone. Yet the question in producing behemoth exhibitions like this is always the same in terms of the number of artists and works: How many? The answer is also always the same: as many as the space will bear.
Monika Sosnowska
GLASGOW The Modern Institute There’s a visual contradiction at the heart of Monika Sosnowska’s new series of sculptures (on view through September 7, 2019). Her mangled steel structures are precisely arranged, hanging on the walls, dangling from the ceiling, and resting imposingly on the concrete floor; they also exude newness with their pristine coats of black paint.
Rebeca Bollinger
SAN FRANCISCO Gallery 16 The elegant, enigmatic objects and images in Bollinger’s recent exhibition, “The Burrow,” suggest props for an unknown theatrical event, re-presented in a gallery setting and thus opened to non-linear readings.
Jannis Kounellis
NEW YORK Gavin Brown’s enterprise “I consider myself a silent poet, a blind painter, and a deaf musician,” Jannis Kounellis once said. Such knotty contradictions were a through-line in the Arte Povera pioneer’s work, as a recent show of 20 sculptural assemblages, dating from 1969 through 2016, recently made clear.
Martin Boyce
ISLE OF BUTE, SCOTLAND Mount Stuart An Inn For Phantoms Of The Outside And In borrows its title from a line in Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Reverie (1960): “Sleep opens within us an inn for phantoms.” Boyce was also inspired by hearing about a long-gone tennis court elsewhere on the grounds.
Doug Aitken
DETROIT Former State Savings Bank Doug Aitken’s Mirage—a full-sized model of a ranch-style house in which every surface is mirrored—originally occupied a site in the desert, adjacent to Palm Springs, California. For Mirage Detroit, he relocated the entire structure to the interior of a long-vacant Beaux-Arts bank building (which dates from 1900 and is attributed to architects McKim, Mead, and White) in Detroit’s Central Business District.
Thomas Schütte
PARIS Monnaie de Paris Anti-heroic, Schütte’s art mixes the mythic with the utilitarian, turning child’s play into a sculptor’s experimentation with materials. An unclassifiable artist, he’s still following the advice that Gerhard Richter gave him when he was a student: find your own way by creating a repertoire, not a style.
Aaron Curry
SINGAPORE STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery Aaron Curry’s ebullient sculptures, recently surveyed in “Fragments from a Collective Unity,” are stretched, swollen, sometimes barbed, and slightly off-kilter. A plethora of organic-looking things filled an entire wall, some wriggling from side to side, some becoming jack-in-the-boxes and popping up from an opening here or there, and yet others more closely approximating bones and remains than life itself.
Phyllida Barlow
LONDON Royal Academy of Arts As “cul-de-sac” demonstrates, Barlow’s skill in courting accident and chance remains unsurpassed. While her materials—plaster, cement, steel, wire mesh, plywood, timber, and fabric—are rooted in the sculptural canon, her methods of deployment are freed from any past constraints.
deCordova New England Biennial 2019
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum A few years ago, the deCordova Museum, famed for its outdoor sculpture collection, transposed its name in order to focus attention on the sculpture park. Yet in choosing this edgy group of 2019 biennial artists, exhibition curators gave short shrift to those who work in three dimensions, admitting only a handful.
