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.
“Rite of Passage: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism, 1960–1966” Hauser & Wirth
New York “Rite of Passage: The Early Years of Vienna Actionism, 1960–1966,” curated by Hubert Klocker, was the first show to present the early years of the Vienna Actionists to a New York audience. Klocker and his academic associate, Gloria Sutton, carefully outlined the importance of these artists—including Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, and
Enrico David
New York Michael Werner Gallery Idiosyncrasy in contemporary sculpture has a way of communicating pleasure and humor, and Enrico David’s recent show did exactly that. His works play with the figure but also maintain a genuine sculptural intelligence that supports his offbeat themes.
Ted Victoria
New York Robert Miller Gallery Ted Victoria continues to baffle and enlighten viewers with works that explore relationships between actual objects and their photographic representations. Iconic sea monkeys, aswim in projection boxes, along with banal objects sequestered within enigmatic camera obscura constructions, still prevail.
Jane Lackey
Santa Fe, New Mexico Center for Contemporary Art Before we learned to write, we learned to speak. Before it was a language recognized by our tribe, it was sound. Our cries of pleasure and pain were connected to what we experienced in our bodies, and as we quickly learned, those sounds could elicit attention and
