Pittsburgh
Carnegie Museum of Art
Cathy Wilkes, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-’80s and then helped to fuel the city’s art scene in the 1990s, has become known for enigmatic, sometimes poignant installations fabricated from sculpted and appropriated found objects. In 2008, the Belfast-born artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in the summer of 2011, she had her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Aspen Art Museum. Her multi-part show at the Carnegie Museum of Art included a new sculpture, an installation centered on three low-to-the-ground tables holding miscellaneous items, and nine complex paintings, which were incorporated into the installation. Over the past 20 years, Wilkes has developed an idiosyncratic vocabulary rooted in individual experience and symbolism. Labor, loss, memory, and motherhood seem to be suggested, but the presentations are neither linear nor obvious; instead, the subtlety of Wilkes’s melancholic sensibility and her choice of materials invite close scrutiny. …see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
