MEXICO CITY Museo Universitario de Arte Contemporaneo (MUAC) Art has borrowed from science since the beginning: we need only recall the adoption of linear perspective in the Renaissance or the rise of photography. The bond between artistic endeavors and technology, to be specific, is so strong that sometimes they seem to be one and the same—a perception that led many artists in the 1960s to explore the possibilities of introducing state-of-the-art materials and techniques, from optical effects to video projections, passing through algorithms, radar, and all kinds of elaborate mechanical devices along the way.
Denis Versweyveld
RUTLAND, VERMONT Castleton Downtown Gallery Denis Versweyveld’s sculptures and drawings view familiar household objects and minimal houses through a meditative lens. Each form, executed in plaster, lath, and cast concrete, is pared down to its essence. Signs of this process, like fine etching lines, remain in the exquisite surfaces. The forms are either miniaturized or human scale, portraits of what we live with every day: a cup, a pitcher, a bowl. The sense of the maker’s hand is ever-present in the dialectic between materiality and refinement, texture and reductive form.
Martin Boyce
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND RISD Museum Four small photographs (Interiors, 1992) served as a motif for Martin Boyce’s recent survey exhibition. Seen in isolation, these grainy colored stills excerpted from the 1985 crime thriller Jagged Edge, are unremarkable; but as a mood-inducing setting for eerie suspense, they become full of foreboding. “When Now Is Night” was a paean to paranoia, a meditation on the menace of ordinary things. Boyce is an aficionado of film noir and of 1970s horror films, as well as the genres they have spawned. His work rests on an underlying theme of unease about the disparity between clean-lined 20th-century design and the uncertain reality of contemporary cities and contemporary life.
Erwin Fabian
MELBOURNE Australian Galleries In a society obsessed with youth and innovation, older artists are often ignored and forgotten. Not so with Erwin Fabian, who recently celebrated his 100th birthday with a major exhibition of new works. There is no need to make concessions for his age: the sculptures have a very strong presence, ranging from the intimate to the imposing. The son of the distinguished painter Max Fabian, Erwin Fabian was born in Berlin in 1915. He was already in London in 1938 when the situation for Jews in Germany was most precarious.
Mark Revels
BANBRIDGE, NORTHERN IRELAND F.E. McWilliam Gallery Mark Revels is a young Irish artist who initially trained in London as a set designer, a disciplined grounding that he brings to bear on his relatively recent career as a sculptor. His latest work, the ceramic and concrete Biofilm under Construction, was sited on the main paved pathway of the F.E. McWilliam Gallery’s sculpture garden, directly in front of the café windows.
James Welling
CHADDS FORD, PENNSYLVANIA Brandywine River Museum of Art “Gradients,” a series of nine works placed around the sprawling, picturesque Brandywine Conservancy surrounding the Brandywine River Museum, was subtitled “A Sculptural Installation by James Welling,” although Welling himself has said that the works are really more like “site-specific photos.” This deceptively simple characterization only hints at the complexity (both visual and conceptual) of these large-scale digital prints on metal erected in the landscape.
Tatiana Trouvé
NEW YORK Central Park On first encounter, Desire Lines, Tatiana Trouvé’s installation at the Doris C. Freedman plaza in Central Park, looked like it could have been discarded from a textile mill. Four large racks—each containing spools grouped large to small (212 in all) and filled with coils of rope in an array of colors and textures—stood at the ready. Each rope, when unwound, gauged the length of a walkway or path in the park, while a small brass plaque mounted along the spool’s rim, and inscribed with a serial number, a descriptive title, and the name of a historical march or walk, or a writing, performance, song, or artwork, lent new associations to the chosen route.
New York: Ulrich Rückriem – Koenig & Clinton
James Siena’s extensive show of large and small, intricate sculptures in wood and metal seemed very much like an essay in structure. In an interview with Julia Schwartz for Figure/Ground, Siena acknowledged the influence of open-wire works of art: “I met Alan Saret early in my years in New York and was tremendously moved by
Mark Hadjipateras
NEW YORK Denise Bibro Fine Art American artist Mark Hadjipateras, of Greek background and now based mostly in Athens, recently put up a terrific show of grisaille paintings and stained aluminum sculptures. The latter are particularly strong, continuing his long-established practice of whimsical artifact. Behind the playfulness, however, viewers will find a formal intelligence that links Hadjipateras in spirit, if not exactly in form, to some of the Modernists, specifically Calder and Jean Arp.
Agnes Denes
NEW YORK Socrates Sculpture Park he Living Pyramid, recently installed at Socrates Sculpture Park, marked Agnes Denes’s first major New York environmental statement in art since 1982, when she constructed the fabled Wheatfield—A Confrontation, a two-acre site of wheat growing only two blocks from Wall Street. This time, her motif was not so directly adversarial. The Living Pyramid was dedicated to David Rockefeller on the occasion of his 100th birthday for his interest in art and the environment; it looks like Denes has made her peace with the captains of industry.
