Art Prospect

ST. PETERSBURG, RUSSIA Art Prospect Last year, Art Prospect, St. Petersburg’s first and only public art festival, marked its fifth year. Since its inception, its artistic vision has been shaped by Susan Katz, an American who has lived in St. Petersburg since 1998, and Kendal Henry, a New Yorker involved with public art. In 2016, the festival focused on social practice and community engagement, with projects by 33 different artists and artist teams, 22 from Russia and the remainder hailing from the U.S., Switzerland, Norway, Finland, and Poland.

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Heinz Mack

NEW YORK Sperone Westwater In Heinz Mack’s recent, three-floor exhibition, carefully selected monochromatic paintings, wall reliefs, ink drawings, and stelae were placed together to read like a narrative. The quest for narrative in abstract terms is beginning to appear integral to Mack’s work. Rather than em phasizing mediumistic aspects, he clearly went for the impact of earthly and celestial light on physical form, a position related in some ways to the Romantic poet, playwright, natural philosopher, painter, and color theorist, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), a figure with whom Mack has been compared.

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Vancouver Biennale

VANCOUVER Vancouver Biennale A stack of five cars, precisely balanced on a twisted old-growth cedar trunk, erupts from a patch of green grass-an incongruity amid the spider web of roadways and elevated rapid-transit lines edging the downtown core of Vancouver. The 33-foot-high, 25,000-pound Trans Am Totem-its massive tree stump supporting the vehicles like an arboreal Atlas-is a tribute to, as well as a critique of the car, North America’s enduring symbol of personal freedom and technological innovation.

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Simon Starling

VANCOUVER Rennie Collection “Simon Starling: Collected Works” featured a selection of projects produced between 2005 and 2014. The British artist, who lives in Copen – hagen, received the Turner Prize in 2005 for Shedboatshed, an oftencited work that established his attachment to the journey form-of travel in the conventional sense and of peregrination from one state or stage to another in temporal, cultural, material, formal, and other contexts, constructs, transformations, and meanings.

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Pipilotti Rist

NEW YORK New Museum These days, theater and spectacle rule public discourse-a perfect moment for Pipilotti Rist’s startlingly prescient critique. Sexy and seductive, soothing and even therapeutic, this survey of Rist’s work from the mid-1980s to the present sought to disrupt the normalizing effect of today’s mediated, digitalized state of being and its accompanying desire for pleasure and entertainment. The exhibition’s subversive purpose was evident in the single-channel videos that initiated Rist’s career.

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