Sofi Zezmer’s early biomorphic abstractions, made predominantly of plastic and occasionally loaded with hues integral to her unorthodox materials, burst into my line of vision toward the beginning of the new millennium. Though playful, her constructions touch on the intersection of science and technology while being imbued with the pulse of life, their forms continuing
Tony Moore
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Sideshow Gallery The ceramic sculptures featured in Tony Moore’s recent exhibition, “Children of Light,” invoke themes of conflict, community, and survival. Alongside the work, Moore posted a warning from Dr. Martin Luther King: “Our generation will have to repent not only for the words and acts of the children of darkness but also for the fears and apathy of the children of light.”
Another Kind of Cell: A Conversation with Kendall Buster
Kendall Buster makes large-scale sculptures out of repeated modular units. Much of her work blurs the line between architecture and sculpture by playing on the notion of scale: while some sculptures are large enough to walk into, others put viewers in a position of power by offering a birds-eye view.
Lucio Fontana
MILAN Pirelli HangarBicocca “Ambienti/Environments,” curator Vicente Todolí’s ambitious reappraisal of Lucio Fontana’s spatial installations and light interventions, focused attention on a little-known aspect of Italy’s leading Modernist, successfully re-constructing nine of these works as life-size cabinets of curiosity. Though less familiar than the “Holes,” “Cuts,” or “Spatial Concepts,” Fontana’s installations marked a comparable break with traditional forms of sculpture and painting, foreshadowing later explorations by Gruppo Zero and Yves Klein.
The Fully Formed is Suspect: A Conversation with Alistair Wilson
Alistair Wilson, who was born in Wales, came to Northern Ireland in the 1970s, after a period in London. For the better part of 30 years, he managed two careers–as a sculptor and as a lecturer in sculpture at the Belfast College of Art.
Gerold Miller
NEW YORK Cassina Projects The German sculptor Gerold Miller lives and works in Berlin. This show, his first in the U.S., offered an anthology of works for which he is well known in Europe. Ostensibly, these sculptures veer toward Mini – malism, but they are more deeply connected to theory than works from the American movement, even if this tie is downplayed and hard to uncover.
Frances Glessner Lee; Rick Araluce
WASHINGTON, DC Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian American Art Museum The “mother of forensic science,” Frances Glessner Lee (1878–1962) was a wealthy heiress from Chicago, who gave a large portion of her inheritance to Harvard University to create the first Department of Legal Medicine in the U.S. She was also the first female police captain in the country.
“To talk to the worms and the stars”
CALGARY, ALBERTA, CANADA The New Gallery “To talk to the worms and the stars,” a line from Arthur Evans’s Witchcraft and the Gay Counterculture, recently found new life as a whimsical incantation and the title of a group exhibition. Each visitor repeated the words when entering the show on the night of the opening and throughout its duration, drawing a linguistically ceremonious line around the space and the featured works.
“Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon”
NEW YORK New Museum The provocatively titled “Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon” took on the politics of gender and identity with works by 40 artists, groups, and collectives. Avoiding the trap of using sexual orientation as an organizing principle and throwing out heteronormative or binary definitions of gendered identity in favor of a more fluid, inclusive, and performative model–one that refused limits and boundaries–the show’s organizer, Johanna Burton, with the assistance of Sara O’Keeffe and Natalie Bell, proposed a more activist curatorial model for how art about gender circulates in contemporary life.
Michael Johansson
WASENAAR, THE NETHERLANDS Museum Voorlinden A first look at Michael Johansson’s work suggests that he might be quoting other contemporary artists a bit too literally. His well-ordered stacks of household objects variously recall Jackie Winsor’s Post-Minimal cubes, Jannis Kounellis’s niche-filling accumulations, and Tom Wessel – mann’s Pop Art Interior (1964), a wall piece that fuses working domestic items and painting to create a hybrid and not-so-quiet vision of quietude.
