Mainz, Germany Kunsthalle Mainz Drawings, notes, texts, objects, models, sculptures, installations, photos of performances, and interventions—Lois Weinberger’s recent exhibition employed a multitude of media, each one on a par with the others. Even within individual genres, Weinberger’s works are extremely heterogeneous in terms of style, theme, and choice of material.
Giorgio Andreotta Calò
London Sprovieri Eschewing John Ruskin’s famous 19th-century treatise The Stones of Venice, contemporary Italian artist Giorgio Andreotta Calò turns instead to the wood of Venice. With an interest in the literal foundations of the place, Calò has taken the massive wooden stakes that support the “floating city” as his sculptural starting point.
Antoni Tàpies
Miami Perez Art Museum Miami “Tàpies: From Within,” the first major survey of Antoni Tàpies’s work since his death in 2012, featured 50 paintings, drawings, and three-dimensional pieces chosen from the artist’s own collection and from the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona.
Nicola L.
New York Elga Wimmer Gallery Nicola L., a French-born, New York-based sculptor of considerable talent, who has won recognition over a period of decades, recently restaged “Atmosphere in White,” a comprehensive show of her work originally presented at the Liverpool Biennial in 2014.
Barbara Cooper
Chicago Perimeter Gallery In an age when creating the next new thing is pervasive, Barbara Cooper, a Chicago-based sculptor, offers a refreshing take on art, with nature as her starting point. Rather than compete with nature, she evoked its depths by using repurposed materials in her recent exhibition, “Repurposing: Small Sculpture.”
Conrad Bakker
Salt Lake City Utah Museum of Fine Art Artists visiting the state of Utah typically make a pilgrimage to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), but they rarely meet the artist head-on, on his own terms. Such was the case, though, with Conrad Bakker’s Robert Smithson Library and Book Club, installed as part of the Utah
“Surround Audience,” New Museum Triennial 2015
New York newmuseum Gatherings of artists into annuals, biennials, and the like have become so common and so global that they now function, like the equally ubiquitous art fairs, as art shopping malls whose main purpose is spotting the latest fashion or the next big trend.
Mariana Castillo Deball
Berlin Hamburger Bahnhof Parergon, an ambitious, operatic installation from Mexican artist Mariana Castillo Deball, explored the biographies of objects in various Berlin museums, particularly the Nationalgalerie. As the title, which means “supplementary work” or “byproduct,” suggests, the work examined and decrypted the history of these collections, their buildings, exhibits, and protagonists.
Andrea Loefke
Brooklyn Smack Mellon Confronting the prow of Andrea Loefke’s ark head-on made a powerful first impression. This foreshortened view indicated something vast and ominous looming just inside the gallery but offered only the merest hint of what was actually there.
William Tucker
London Pangolin London William Tucker’s monumental bronze sculptures are incredibly difficult to reproduce in photographs. Despite careful lighting and the judicious use of close-ups, most catalogues do not succeed in being more than an aide-mémoire.
