LONDON Barbican Hatoum’s deployment of geometry and abstraction transcends the specific, yet the threat of violence is always close at hand.
Jessi Reaves
MINNEAPOLIS Walker Art Center Much of the material in these works, including cotton batting, velvet, sewing pins, mink fur, and hangers, points to classic markers of the domestic feminine. But Reaves’s approach to destruction and repurposing does not completely refute these themes and tropes; instead, it feels more like an acknowledgement and remixing.
Max Hooper Schneider
NEW YORK 125 Newbury Fusing nature and artifice while highlighting metamorphosis, conversion, and collaborative practice, these sculptures recall Hieronymus Bosch’s fantastic hybrid figures and exploration of alchemy and science, philosophy and religious belief.
Cosima von Bonin
LONDON Raven Row von Bonin’s installations, which combine found objects and handmade elements, retain a deliberate looseness aligned with her Cologne milieu of the 1990s—an anti-heroic sensibility that dismantles the cult of authorship, authenticity, and artistic genius.
Armando Guadalupe Cortés
BROOKLYN Smack Mellon Cortés’s work renders parrots not only as metaphors for migration and adaptability, but also as proxies for human connection.
Irma Hünerfauth
LONDON Arcadia Missa While Hünerfauth struggled with the social and political conditions of post-Nazi Germany, she also attempted to understand rising pressures on perception, community, and nature in the face of technological advancement.
Lauren Grossman
SEATTLE Traver Gallery Cocked (2020), with its cage of interlocking steel rods, summons up the classical sculptural convention of contrapposto; bending to one side, the viewer vicariously enters into dialogue with the captive figure, complete with black cast-iron ears.
Eugene Macki
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory Without a doubt, it is the visitor who is destined to activate this uncanny field of objects and to find meaning through his or her own experience and reimagining. As Ilya Kabakov has said: “The main actor in a total installation, the main center toward which everything is addressed, for which everything is intended, is the viewer.”
Lori Goodman and Teddy Milder
EUREKA AND BENECIA, CALIFORNIA The Barn Gallery and Arts Benecia collective grief—in memoriam packs more than 100 boxy forms made of handmade paper onto a low, nine-by-12-foot plinth to create an aggregation of structures that recall the apartment buildings and office towers of every midsize city around the world—all of them similar, no two exactly alike.
