HELSINKI Galerie Anhava A strikingly potent, yet ultimately illusory air of reticence pervaded “Olympic Drawings,” a show highlighting Kristján Gudmundsson’s discerning series of recent sculptures and a carefully selected handful of related works. Their singularly reductive style evades facile interpretation. This frequently induces consternation in gallery-goers, who are faced with familiar objects situated in contexts that thwart expectations and offer no obvious clues as to how they could or should be read.
Joan Giordano
NEW YORK June Kelly Gallery Joan Giordano’s recent exhibition “Woven in Time” spoke to both the history of art and postmodern phenomena. Her constructions, which straddle the boundaries of painting, collage, and sculpture, can be compared to Kurt Schwitters’s “Merz” Her process begins when she selects an issue from the global news and prints the sometimes-illustrated article on heavy-weight archival watercolor paper to preserve it, before rolling, twisting, and/or scorching it. By soaking the paper, she is able to shape it into dimensional forms directly on the wall, which she combines with other materials before painting the entire composition.
Joe Fyfe
NEW YORK Nathalie Karg Gallery “Kiss the Sky,” Joe Fyfe’s recent exhibition, was a tour-de-force, seamlessly merging bright colors and quotidian materials, including steel, plastic, nylon, fabric, found wood, ink, rope, acrylic, and crayon. With some sculptures zigzagging down the middle of the long gallery, the show created a sort of color field so that the space itself became an active player in the interaction of mass, color, and movement. It’s obvious that Fyfe’s works merge collage, painting, and sculpture with a nod to architecture.
Ed Parrish, Jr.
PITTSBURGH The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination Iron, written in the stars, holds the earth together deep within its core. It glides through the bloodstream, lustrous, magnetic, essential to existence. In Ed Parrish, Jr.’s hands, this elemental metal seems palpably alive. His sculptures embody iron’s molten volatility, cooled into austere, meditative forms that describe a dynamic cosmos while creating moments of revelatory quiet. Assemblage, iron casting, and painting merge in works that appear otherworldly – as if from a place of mysterious possibilities – yet feel intimate, full of familiar, sensual elements.
Maurizio Cattelan
NEW YORK Guggenheim Museum Latrine, potty, WC, john, head, loo, privy, throne-polite epithets for the lowly toilet-are feeble descriptions for the plumbing fixture when it achieves high art honors, as it does with Maurizio Cattelan’s America, a fully functioning, 18-karat-gold replica of a commercial Kohler model. Set inside the Guggenheim’s fifth floor unisex lavatory and accorded the same egalitarian public access as its more accessibly priced porcelain cousins, it transcends all prior notions of performance and interactive art.
Amie McNeel, Mark Zirpel, and Sam Stubblefield
SEATTLE MadArt MadArt founder Allison Milliman wants to demystify the process of creating art by bringing it into the community. Artists, who are invited to imagine and create in a massive 4,000-square-foot space with 23-foot-high ceilings, work in full view of the street, visible through large sliding glass doors that encourage obsessed techies (this is the Amazon zone of Seattle) and other members of the public to observe or participate in the artistic process.
“Not All That Falls Has Wings”
ISTANBUL ARTER “Not All That Falls Has Wings,” a group exhibition of works by Bas Jan Ader, Phyllida Barlow, Ryan Gander, Mikhail Karikis and Uriein Orlow, Cyprien Gaillard, VOID, and Anne Wenzel, considered the act of falling as an earthly condition. Curator Selen Ansen selected works focused on the “productive dimension of falling” in which, “rather than sublimating reality,” the artistic gesture seeks “to create the conditions for dealing with the surface, and coming to terms with the bottom.”
Hans Peter Kuhn
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory On Friday, June 17, 2016, William Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, flipped the switch to unveil the Mattress Factory’s new light commission, Acupuncture, a permanent public art installation created by German artist Hans Peter Kuhn. Berlin-based Kuhn is an ingenious self-taught artist and composer who makes large-scale, site-specific light and sound environments for public spaces.
Jessica Stockholder
NEW YORK Mitchell-Innes & Nash Though Jessica Stockholder is known for both freestanding sculptures and works that extend from the wall into space, she introduced an interactive component into her recent exhibition. Taking over almost half of a large gallery space, the title work, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, fused aspects of sculpture and painting with an active experience of viewing. Biomorphic shapes rendered in vibrant colors were transformed into a large stage and platform. Meanwhile, each viewer’s individual engagement with the work helped to make it responsive to constant flux-Stockholder’s sculptural rendition of an ephemeral moment.
Cornelia Parker
NEW YORK Metropolitan Museum of Art The big buzz surrounding Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (Psycho Barn) on the Met roof was well-deserved. The family-friendly art experience offered up visual clues in many directions. Though the Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) is in black and white, Parker’s scaled-down (three-quarters actual size), blood-red version of the Bates house had many of the same features, including the wagon-wheel wood scallops on the porch and an oculus on the steeply sloped Mansard roof. Like its inspiration, Parker’s object was only the front of a house.
