New York Klein Sun Gallery For decades now, Beijing-based Zhang Dali has been making art that challenges China’s status quo, which (most of the Chinese art world would agree) needs to be challenged. His graffiti and cut-out outlines of his head in the ruins of Beijing buildings—destroyed to make room for new architecture—were signs of
Rebecca Horn
Cambridge, Massachusetts Harvard Art Museums Rebecca Horn’s Flying Books under Black Rain Painting, a commissioned, performance-based installation at the Prescott Street entrance of the recently re-branded Harvard Art Museums, is visible from the street, as is Ai Weiwei’s multimedia installation 258 Fake.
Patrick Nickell
Santa Monica Rosamund Felsen Gallery If Patrick Nickell were a writer, his arena would be neither poetry nor prose, but stream-of-consciousness. Using a vocabulary of wire, plaster, and paint, he realizes a hybrid, chimerical territory consisting of partly fictional, partly poetic, quasi-realist objects made credible through their irregular, oddly elegant surfaces and idiosyncratic imagery.
Bernardi Roig
Washington, DC The Phillips Collection The latest exhibition in the “Intersections” series at the Phillips Collection featured Bernardi Roig—one of the most intriguing artists working in Spain at present. In the spirit of the overall series, curator Vesela Sretenovic invited him to engage the museum both as an institution and as the former home of
Mie Olise
Los Angeles Samuel Freeman Gallery “Noplacia,” the title of Danish artist Mie Olise’s recent exhibition, is taken from the opening line of the poem that introduces Thomas More’s Utopia (1516). More invented both word and concept, basing his visualization of a perfect society on Plato’s Republic.
Zhang Huan
New Windsor, New York Storm King Art Center Zhang Huan’s multi-disciplinary blockbuster show at Storm King offered a material exercise in storytelling that turned on his biography and laid out his views on Chinese tradition, religion, and politics.
Brenda Garand
New York Lesley Heller Workspace Brenda Garand’s sculpture series “Northern Passage” reflects on the devastation caused by Tropical Storm Irene (2011), including the destruction of her Vermont studio on the White River. Garand’s notions of nature and culture evoke her French Canadian, Abenaki, and British heritages.
Todd Slaughter
Cincinnati Alice F. and Harris K. Weston Art Gallery At first glance, “Todd Slaughter: American Primitives” might have seemed designed to amuse and delight, but that’s too easy. Slaughter wants people looking at his work to think.
Kate Ritson
San Antonio Southwest School of Art Kate Ritson, a professor of art at San Antonio’s Trinity University, has unveiled a new body of work after a difficult decade spent caring for aging parents and dealing with her own health issues.
Alexandra Bircken
Rotterdam Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Alexandra Bircken’s recent exhibition, which was installed in conjunction with the Boijmans Van Beuningen’s headline show “Brancusi, Rosso, Man Ray—Framing Sculpture,” featured more than 40 sculptural works produced since 2004. Bircken is becoming increasingly known for her assemblages of diverse materials and everyday objects.
