WASHINGTON, DC Flashpoint gallery Anthony Cervino’s “Ejecta” exhibition combined well-crafted sculptures with a pointed narrative and a book of insightful conversations between artist and curator. The role of the curator is to balance objective decision-making distance and intimate knowledge of the work. In its best form, the relationship between artist and curator works as a true co-dependency, one crutch holding the other up, but at its worst, it becomes a distraction obfuscating the artist’s intent.
Ricky Swallow
LOS ANGELES David Kordansky Gallery Ricky Swallow’s work alludes to the real while posing as abstraction. As per the title of his recent exhibition, “Skews,” his intimately scaled bronzes “skew” reality so that their material representation performs a different version of factuality. Interacting with them requires putting into play something the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan referred to as “looking awry.” When you confront these objects directly, objectively, you see a collection of mis- matched, somewhat crudely assembled elements drawn from daily life.
Robert Thiele
MIAMI MDC Museum of ART + Design Robert Thiele, who splits his time between Miami and Brooklyn, has been making art since the mid-1960s. Simultaneously sculptural and painterly, obfuscating and revealing, his works, which range from small, wall-mounted pieces to tall, imposing sculptures, abound with paradoxes. “Untitled (3 for 8),” a selection of works from the early 1980s to the present, revealed Thiele’s dialectics — intimacy/monumentality, surface/depth, dependence/autonomy, old/new — to be part of the same continuum.
Rafael Lozano-Hemmer
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.
