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.
Leigh Hall
BOSTON Atlantic Works Gallery The Atlantic Works Gallery, at the edge of Boston Harbor, occupies the top floor of a repurposed building that was once part of the East Boston shipping industry. Leigh Hall, the sculptor of the two-person exhibition “Metaphors and Metamorphoses” (which also included the assemblages of Suzanne Mercury), combed the streets of the surrounding industrial neighborhood for many of the materials included in the show. Hall uses a combination of needlework techniques to stitch together found pieces of metal wire of different thicknesses.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA Christopher Grimes Gallery “Well 34°01’03”N–118°29’12”W,” the title of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s recent exhibition, represents the coordinates of the Grimes Gallery’s location in Santa Monica, introducing a multi-part work that required consideration of the geographical, social, economic, and political dimensions of water. The installation itself was titled P’oe 34°01’03”N—118°29’12”W. P’oe means “gift” in Tewa, the indigenous language of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico; the numbers indicate the coordinates of a well dug there in 2014. P’oe was clinical in its stark minimality.
14th Istanbul Biennial
ISTANBUL Saltwater As a migration crisis unfolded in Turkey (refugees on rubber rafts were trying to reach Greece from the Turkish coast), a biennial titled “Saltwater” seemed an amazing coincidence. But innocuous as the title appeared, the theme encompassed political, spiritual, mystical, and scientific metaphors reaching back into history through the present and into the future. “Tuzlu su” (“Saltwater”) featured venues that could not be seen, installations in obscure locations, and ferry trips to the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara and up the Bosphorus.
Roberley Bell and Boston Sculptors
STOCKBRIDGE, MA Chesterwood Margaret French wrote a line or two a day in the diaries that she kept in the early 20th century. French was the only child of Mary and Daniel Chester French, the sculptor best known for the Lincoln Memorial. He and his wife and daughter spent as much time as possible at his Berkshire summer estate, Chesterwood, until his death in 1931. Margaret’s entries in the diaries were terse and factual. On August 9, 1905, she wrote: “Went down to the store in morning. Played tennis in aft. And drove over to Stockbridge.
