Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has worked with sound for years, but her background is in sculpture. For her, the two fields have been intertwined from the beginning. When studying sculpture at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, in the early 1990s, she contemplated the physicality of producing sound, how
Working the Devil Out: Mitch Mitchell
Historically, sculpture has been an influence more than it has been influenced, though that changed with Modernism, when sculptors began to turn to other media, primarily painting, for inspiration. From Picasso, with the collage and Cubism, and Marcel Duchamp, with the readymade, to a host of color field and Abstract Expressionists, 20th century abstract sculpture
A Conversation with Richard Nonas: Telling it Slant
Richard Nonas’s studio, a Wunderkammer piled high with artifacts and relics, as well as past and in-progress works, unfolds with the unexpected surprises of an archaeological dig. Hunkered down within a jungle of antique vises and drills, ladders, chains, axes, arbitrarily stacked books, pulleys, rugs, handmade kayaks, and countless constructions of wood and steel are
Making Chaos Legible: A Conversation with Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew’s newest and largest work to date, Number 197 (on view through October 29), activates and energizes the atrium of the de Young Museum in San Francisco with an orchestrated arrangement of wall-mounted sculptural elements.
Dispatch: Venice Biennale
VENICE Venice Biennale Christine Macel, curator of the Centre Pompidou and of “Viva Arte Viva,” the 57th International Exhibition, describes art as a force for life: “Art in itself helps us to navigate in these times; its very existence is a resistance in itself… Contemporary art cannot be understood as mere representation or imitation: it is a reality tout court, an instrument of inquiry, both of the creative process and of the different questions pertaining to Humankind and the world.”
“Juxtapoz x Superflat”
VANCOUVER Vancouver Art Gallery “Juxtapoz x Superflat,” a group exhibition of 36 international artists organized by Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd and co-curated by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Evan Pricco, editor-in-chief of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, premiered as a four-day pop-up show at Pivot Art + Culture in Seattle; it then had a three-month run at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Marisa Merz
NEW YORK The Met Breuer “The Sky is a Great Space” emphasized the consistency behind Marisa Merz’s body of work over chronology, starting with the larger-than-life “Living Sculpture” series (1966) at the exhibition entrance. These giant slinky-toy-like aluminum sheets hung from the ceiling in curls, spirals, and amorphous dangling “bodies”–most (excepting a wrapped armchair and a tent-like shape) without antecedent as “forms.” Breath alone could make them sway.
“so it is”
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory The group exhibition “so it is,” curated by Belfast native John Carson, presented an impressive collection of installation work by seven artists from Northern Ireland. A practicing artist himself, Carson lived in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s during the Troubles. He drew on this experience while making his selections, choosing Ursula Burke, Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, John Kindness, Locky Morris, Philip Napier, and Paul Seawright for their sensitivity to this volatile time of political and nationalistic conflict.
Kevin Francis Gray
NEW YORK Pace Gallery Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein recently transformed Boston Sculptors Gallery into a new kind of Wonderland with their related shows, “Zodiac” and “Geology.” Dodson’s anthropomorphic deities, arranged in two circles, reference both Chinese and Western zodiac symbols. The archetypal figures emanate an extraordinary calm. Each takes a similar stolid stance yet clearly expresses her individuality.
Daniel Boccato
BROOKLYN The Journal Gallery Kevin Francis Gray’s recent solo exhibition found the neoclassically inspired bronze and marble sculptor making his boldest moves yet in testing the representational ideal of the human figure against a contemporary perspective. More than ever, the exploration of tensions inherent in the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction, which has defined Gray’s practice, becomes the central subject of his work.
