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.
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.
Color Coded: A Conversation with Rana Begum
For the American sculptor Donald Judd, simplicity focused attention on the object in space: “It isn’t necessary for a work to have a lot of things to look at, to compare, to analyze one by one, to contemplate.
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.
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.
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.
Wangechi Mutu
NEW YORK Gladstone Gallery The work in Wangechi Mutu’s recent exhibition-installed to create a loose circle inside a square space- was aesthetically sophisticated, empathic, and symbolic. On the surface, Mutu’s 23 new sculptures are formal and classical, a visual contrast to her sensorial mixed-media installation, A Fantastic Journey, which traveled to four U.S. museums during 2013–14. The elegant, finished surfaces in burnt sienna, brown, gray, and black conjure the earth-its wounds and diseases, people, and species nearing extinction.
Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs
NEW YORK SculptureCenter This exhibition of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (Congolese Plantation Workers Art League or CATPC) could not have been timelier. It arrived at a moment when racial and economic inequalities are center stage, and the voices of the suppressed are being heard. Featuring a series of chocolate sculptures made from molds obtained from 3D prints of the clay originals, the show brought artistry from the rural hinterland of the Democratic Republic of Congo to the U.S.
Fred Eversley
WALTHAM, MASSACHUSETTS Rose Art Museum However much Minimalism may be out of fashion, the products of that movement still retain the capacity to delight the eye. The 13 works in Fred Eversley’s recent exhibition, “Black, White, Gray,” date from the mid-1970s; they eschew chromatic qualities, yet they contain tricks and delights that on analysis produce a kind of optical circus. All but one are made of cast polyester resin, hand-polished to the perfection of an astronomical lens. Most are circular.
Kemang Wa Lehulere
CHICAGO The Art Institute of Chicago Kemang Wa Lehulere, an artist, performer, photographer, and filmmaker,was born in Cape Town in 1984 to a white father (the son of Irish missionaries) and a black mother when mixed-race relationships and the children of such unions were illegal. The end of apart heid in 1994 came too late for Wa Lehulere’s parents, who were never able to live together, and who both died before he was 12. This personal history conjoined to the larger history of South Africa under apartheid forms the conceptual base of his work, which is never literal.
