BARCELONA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA) Commissioning contemporary art for a historical space always risks a vacuous result. This thought lingered in the back of my mind when I went to see Carlos Bunga’s three-part installation in the Convent dels Àngels at the Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art (MACBA), but it quickly evaporated. His discerning interventions could not have been less glib. In fact, they functioned as a lever to promote reflection on issues ranging from the complex’s evolving visual, material, spatial, and functional characteristics to the idiosyncrasies of the built environment and the continuing evolution of the urban fabric.
DÜSSELDORF
DUSSELDORF Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, K21 Standehaus Tiny figures teeter and bounce amid looming, massive spheres. Easy to miss from the floor of the Ständehaus’s vast atrium, the incongruous drama flits against a faceted glass roof more than 75 feet overhead. Triangular roof panes recall a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome, as well as his musings on livable environments. But as critic Ronald Jones points out, Tomás Saraceno can be distinguished from earlier futurists because he aligns divergent realms of expertise and industrial materials with a scalable vision to create physically accessible environments.
Alain Kirili
NEW YORK AND GHENT, NEW YORK Hionas Gallery and Art Omi The lyricism of postwar Matisse and the muscularity of postwar American art are often viewed as opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum. Alain Kirili’s recent work, shown at two different venues, implicitly addresses this polarity. He first explored this path in 1978, when he began incorporating wire into abstractly modeled terra-cotta volumes. A few years ago, twisted wire and rubber works revealed a fertile re-engagement with gestural abstraction, as Kirili moved away from the totemic and volumetric creations that had defined his work for the past two decades.
Donna Dennis
NEW YORK Mixed Greens Once Donna Dennis decided to close the doors she had made, they opened for her. When she landed in New York City in the early ’70s and found herself smack within the barbed crosshairs of feminism and male-driven Minimalism, she confronted both. Her series of “door works”—including Egyptian Hotel (1972), a slim mastaba- like door—resembled geometrically shaped canvases that physically led nowhere. Instead, they functioned as psychological passageways through which Dennis discovered her voice.
John Crawford
NEW YORK Lori Bookstein Fine Art John Crawford, a Brooklyn-based artist whose output consists of welded steel sculptures, spent 10 years (1976–86) in Tuscany working at a blacksmith’s shop after graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design. Since 1995, he has been interested in the smithing works of various West African cultures. As a result of these models, his work is highly tactile, abstract, and often totemic. Abstract steel sculpture has a long, illustrious history in the U.S., but Crawford’s vision is quite different. He borrows from the forms of other places to create work that openly relates to its making, as well as to the history of American creativity.
Christopher Frost
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery Chinese scholar’s rocks are hunks of stone sculpted by nature into bizarre and visually interesting shapes. Pitted, eroded, and wrinkled, they evoke landscapes, waves, mountain peaks, sometimes human and animal figures. In Asia, they are mounted on individually designed bases as objects of contemplation and inspiration. Boston sculptor Christopher Frost, fascinated by such “viewing stones,” received an alumni grant from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts to travel to China and seek them out on their home turf.
“Ephemeral Art in the Landscape”
EAST HADDAM, CONNECTICUT I-Park I-Park’s fifth Environmental Art Biennale, “Ephemeral Art in the Landscape,” featured site-specific, outdoor installations by 12 artists-in-residence from the U.S. and Europe, who presented their works in a culminating, one-day happening. Guided walking tours allowed the public to experience the projects amid the park’s immersive natural setting. Unique in New England, I-Park functions as a conceptual drawing board where artists can experiment without a specific result in mind, and public access is limited to protect the artists’ privacy as they work.
Isa Genzken
BONN, GERMANY Bundeskunsthalle Visitors to the last Venice Biennale might recall Isa Genzken’s 23 models for outdoor sculptures, which appeared in the main pavilion. If not, this probably has more to do with curator Okwui Enwezor’s incomprehensible decision to present them with, of all things, Walker Evans’s legendary photo series “Let us now praise famous men” than with the sculptures themselves. The models were recently shown again in Bonn, with 12 new additions; together, these 35 works document Genzken’s public projects from 1986 to the present. The exhibition, however, offered far more than mere documentation.
Doug & Mike Starn
PRINCETON, NJ Princeton University Art Museum Standing nearly 18 feet tall and weighing eight tons, Doug and Mike Starn’s luminous outdoor installation (Any) Body Oddly Propped continues their preoccupation with dendritic growth and sunlight, while adding a weightiness not previously seen in their work. Seven tremendous steel frames hold vividly colored glass panels etched with silhouettes of tree branches that form networks akin to veins or synapses. The massive rectangles, like deconstructed architecture, are propped diagonally against one another; two are held up (or rather seem to be) by spindly cast-bronze tree limbs.
Raul Keller
HELSINKI SIC Galleria Raul Keller’s artistic trajectory cuts through the realms of sound art, video, photography, live performance, and installation. For his gallery and museum exhibitions, he often brings in elements from several of these spheres to create site-specific installations that immerse the viewer in sonic environments. In recent years, his explorations have tended to use a specific range of sound devices—typically, membrane speakers, trampolines in various shapes and sizes, and parabolic dishes, which he presents in diverse arrangements. At times, colored light imparts an additional aura of drama, mystery, or wonder.
