PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory Dennis Maher is an artist, architect, and educator whose undertakings over the past 15 years have focused on the process of deconstruction and reconstitution. For years, he has been investigating an art/architectural method of building that involves demolition, renovation, and restoration. Using a variety of media, including drawing, photography, collage, video, sound, and light, he creates works that appear to intertwine order and chaos.
John Monti
NEW YORK Grace Building The works in John Monti’s recent series “Beauties,” or more casually “flower clusters,” touch on elements of Surrealism associated with Kurt Seligmann or Joan Miró. With their heightened organic levity, these unique individuals might be seen as intertwined flora and fauna – plantlike entities given over to a spontaneous bursting forth into quizzical, unexpected forms with an alien presence. Less humanoid than cunningly eerie inhabitants of another world, their weird organs remain isolated, as if discovered in a lost spacecraft hovering between turbulent galaxies.
“Generations”
AUSTIN Russel Collection Fine Art Gallery Every art historian knows that art is born from art, and yet critics and curators persist in celebrating the lone genius, seemingly sprung from nowhere and preferably having already succumbed to a tragic death. So it is a special pleasure to review this legacy exhibition of Charles Umlauf (1911–94) and four of his children – his sons, Arthur and Karl, and two daughters, Madelon and Lynn. ambiguities. Wall, paper, and canvas become multiple layers of skin, adhering to and peeling away from each other and constantly reforming.
Kristján Gudmundsson
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.”
