NEW YORK Frances Naumann Fine Art Mike Bidlo is one of the earliest of the so-called “appropriation” artists in the U.S. Others, such as Sturtevant, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine, have received considerable attention, but Bidlo was there at the beginning. One might argue that he came from another place, from his own observations, not only in relation to Duchamp, but also in relation to other artists, ranging from Léger to Pollock. Indeed, Bidlo continues to maintain a focus on Duchamp, which may verge on obsession. I am not referring to “obsession” as a clinical condition, but as an extreme aesthetic focus.
Robert Lach
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY Solo(s) Project House Robert Lach is a mid-career sculptor whose studio (since 2013) is just down the hall from the exhibition space at Solo(s), a gallery that during the winter dedicates its expanse to in-house artists working on special projects and new works. Lach uses Arte Povera mainstays such as found wood, cardboard, tape, and spackle to build organic sculptures through repetitions of form—hence “Cellular,” the title of the show. One of his most interesting materials is white packing foam, which is highly flexible. Many artists today are working with throw-away materials in an attempt to realign sculpture with a physical reality not so distant from actual life.
Jessica Straus
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery From afar, Jessica Straus’s carefully constructed and colorful forms appear quirky and playful. A closer look at the circus colors, however, reveals a less happy message. These pieces are a polemic about the world’s next crisis—the lack of drinkable water. Oversize oil cans and water carriers are covered with strips sliced from red-and-yellow “Danger” signs. We can piece the letters together to read “Caution,” “Non beber,” “Non potable,” and “Do not drink.” Meticulous, time-consuming craftsmanship has been a hallmark of Straus’s work throughout her career.
Libby Black
SAN FRANCISCO Gallery 16 With a sweetly acerbic humor, Libby Black’s work navigates the roiled waters of desire and consumption as experienced through the filters of feminism, lesbian culture, and the great American obsession with self-help—and its frequent traveling companion, addiction. Well over a decade ago, Black began creating paper-and-paint sculptures that replicate high-end luxury goods: Kate Spade shoes, Louis Vuitton bags, even things as large as a Mercedes.
Doris Salcedo
NEW YORK Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Doris Salcedo asks questions that are difficult to answer. Can art serve a purpose? Can it act as witness or perform as testimonial? Can it console and heal? Can it repurpose trauma? Can it be both aesthetically pleasing and meaningful? These queries form the heart of Salcedo’s practice. But rather than reply, she ensnares us in the creative and moral challenges of making art in a world dominated by war, state-sponsored violence, and terrorism. As a recent retrospective demonstrated, Salcedo has long dealt with the mechanisms of power and its abuse.
Cristina Schiavi
BUENOS AIRES Miranda Bosch Gallery An important artist in the history of Argentine art, Cristina Schiavi is also a curator and manager of major projects, including Basilico, which she developed for international residencies. After several years without a solo exhibition, Schiavi recently reappeared with works that establish a dialogue between abstract geometric Modernism and the figuration that she says defines her. What stands out in her shows, however, are not recognizable human presences or clearly identifiable objects. Schiavi plays with structure, volume, color, and materials— in this case, MDF and acrylics—while installing her works in a larger spatial web of words and sketches.
Alina Szapocznikow
NEW YORK Andrea Rosen Gallery Alina Szapocznikow was a supreme bricoleuse. She treated the odd assemblage of parts constituting the human body as her scrap box, junk heap, and obsession. During her brief life (1926–73), she used all aspects and conditions of the body as a resource, and she experienced most of them herself. A concentration camp survivor, a mother, a cancer victim, she mined spectacles of fatality and mortality for her subject matter. If this sounds grim, it isn’t—her work deals with abjection and suffering in a fondly ironic way—and even depictions of suffering and grief are witty and mordantly funny. Szapocznikow conceived of the body as a variable semantic assemblage, referring to it as “that complete erogenous zone.”
Andrew Lyght
NEW PALTZ, NEW YORK Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art, State University of New York “Full Circle,” the recent retrospective of Guyana-born Andrew Lyght, featured five decades of sculptures, installations, drawings, paintings, and prints—categories that blur and overlap through his work. Lyght’s concerns are volume, surface, space, and light, as well as forms that can adapt to changing circumstances. His most recent wall works, for instance, are constructed from curved pieces of plywood, vellum, or paper, painted in solid fruity colors and pinned to underlying wooden crosspieces, an elegant and economical solution that allows the work to be freed from the plane.
Pat Lay
NEWARK, NEW JERSEY Aljira, a Center for Contemporary Art Pat Lay, who retired not long ago from the MFA program that she founded at Montclair State University, recently mounted a major retrospective at Aljira, a prominent nonprofit space in downtown Newark. Curated by Lilly Wei, the show covered decades of work, from late-’60s clay pieces to works made as recently as 2015. There was a good mix of three-dimensional and two-dimensional work, including archival prints whose exquisite symmetry is constructed from computer-parts imagery, but Lay has acknowledged that the true turn of her work is sculptural.
Laura Evans
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery Laura Evans is best known for her bronze versions of brown paper lunch bags—crinkles, folds, and all. Real lunch bags are meant to be disposable ephemera. Evans’s bronzes will last for the ages. They’re comical. Tucked in a bookcase indoors or sitting on the grass outside, they sometimes make people giggle. While still engaged with the lunch bags, Evans moved on to tree branches in her recent show, “The Aching Web.” These antic constructions had a presence even before you entered the gallery. One of them started on the floor of the large room, struggled to climb over a railing, and ended up on a shelf just below the big windows looking onto the street.
