BEACON, NEW YORK Catalyst Gallery Pablo Garcia Lopez is like a modern-day Bernini, sculpting baroque figures in cast natural silk, rather than marble, to create exquisite and contradictory sculptures. Exploiting the sensuousness of spun-silk, he sets that soft fleshiness against the sharp steel of surgical implements to shock and fascinate. In Wedding Cake with Pietà Topper, Garcia Lopez uses band-saw blades with upright teeth to define the five tiers of the “cake,” which is topped by Michelangelo’s well-known image of Mary holding the body of Christ.
David Hammons
NEW YORK Mnuchin Gallery Over the decades, David Hammons’s aesthetic originality has maintained relevance through his oblique use of materials and subtle manner of transmitting meaning through seemingly incongruous, yet fertile combinations of objets trouvés. There are many examples, ranging from rock and hair sculptures to vibrantly lyrical Kool-Aid paintings and his rugged use of black rubber, fabric, concrete, and steel, not to mention his snowballs and paintings concealed by tarpaulins.
“Megacities Asia”
BOSTON Museum of Fine Arts The immersive, often interactive installations showcased in “Megacities Asia” explored identity amid the masses, sociopolitical issues, and ecological concerns. In a show that mimicked urban sprawl, curators Al Miner and Laura Weinstein examined the successes and failures of Asia’s boomtowns by cherry-picking artists from Beijing, Delhi, Mumbai, Seoul, and Shanghai. Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa’s Breathing Flower was sited next to the museum’s Huntington Avenue entrance. The giant, inflated crimson blossom fluttered buoyant in the wind. At bustling Faneuil Hall, Choi’s inflatable Fruit Tree was equally vivid.
Vik Muniz
THE HAGUE Mauritshuis In 2008, the same year that Vik Muniz produced his first Versos, Gerard Byrne took some black and white photographs of the backs of historical paintings and interspersed them with other pictures and a film installation in an exhibition that explored uncertainties linked to time. These images prompted consternation for how they blended past and present, contrasted image production technologies, and elicited a range of inherent contradictions-particularly in their titles.
Antonia Papatzanaki
NEW YORK President’s Gallery, John Jay College of Criminal Justice Greek-born Antonia Papatzanaki is a sculptor of light. Her public installations are well known in Greece, particularly in Athens, where she lives part of the year while residing at other times in New York. Her recent exhibition, “Stratifications,” featured two bodies of work: “Exceeding Limits,” a series of wall-mounted sculptures consisting of metal casing and curving Plexiglas forms that emanate light from a hidden source, and the “Cellular” series, which takes its cue from cellular structures and includes both computer-generated prints and sculptures made from layers of Plexiglas.
Jeffrey Gibson
SAVANNAH, GEORGIA Savannah College of Art and Design Museum of Art “A Kind of Confession,” Jeffrey Gibson’s captivating recent exhibition, borrowed its title from James Baldwin, who wrote that “all art is a kind of confession, more or less oblique. All artists…are forced, at last, to tell the whole story.” A member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and half-Cherokee, Gibson drew from his Native American heritage, as well as from his experience living overseas. His paintings, along with embellished works bearing messages, hung from the walls, but viewers could not help but be immediately drawn to his mesmerizing, three-dimensional work.
Alison Knowles
PITTSBURGH Carnegie Museum of Art For five decades, Alison Knowles has been expanding the parameters of art with performative works and participatory installations. A founding member of Fluxus with George Maciunas, she moved through the 1960s downtown New York City art scene with the likes of Joseph Beuys, Yoko Ono, and Nam June Paik. Working alongside Marcel Duchamp and John Cage influenced her development significantly. What set Knowles apart from other Fluxus artists, however, was the element of touch.
Nicole Eisenman
NEW YORK New Museum Starting with a deflated Captain America sleeping-or knocked out-on a pilaster, Nicole Eisenman’s recent exhibition addressed cultural and gender identity. “Al-ugh-ories” opened with Captain America’s nondescript, battered brown head at rest on a worn baseball glove. The sculpture was surrounded by weird paintings of a deep-sea diver, an androgynous, long-haired Hamlet with sword and skull, a green head, a cuffed and shackled nude maiden (Spring Fling), and a self-portrait of the artist in an overloaded, cramped studio/houseboat on a turbulent sea.
Stefano Cagol
TRENT, ITALY Civica/MART Civica, the Trent branch of MART, Italy’s lauded contemporary art museum, ingeniously structured Stefano Cagol’s mid-career retrospective into a cycle that evoked the return of the native son to the site of his first exhibition. Beginning with an early self-portrait (1998) compounded into four states of motion, the show traced the paradigm shift that characterizes two decades of Cagol’s work. Unity through duality is a chief preoccupation, from early video experiments to September 11 (2009), an LED of memorial events on his birthday.
Ugo Rondinone
ROTTERDAM Museum of Boijmans Van Beuningen Maybe it is a good idea to fill a museum with 45 life-like sculptures of clowns supplemented by colorful, rainbow-inspired and cartoon-like works—or maybe not. In any event, Ugo Rondinone chose to do just this in his recent exhibition, “Vocabulary of Solitude,” which also doubled as a retrospective of his color spectrum works. This was one of the weirdest art experiences I’ve had in some time, prompting a PTSD-like reaction similar to those I had in response to the 1980s horror films of my youth.
