Despite the radical openness and pluralism that characterize contemporary artistic practice, the phrase “ceramic sculpture” can still be interpreted as an oxymoron. There are exceptions, of course, such as Turner Prize nominee Rebecca Warren’s evocative figures and Ken Price’s colorful abstractions.
Sandra Muss
WASHINGTON, DC The Kreeger Museum Walking through the woods at the Kreeger Museum, visitors encounter a series of seven rather mysterious pillars (the seven pillars of wisdom from Proverbs?), although it takes a moment to identify them since they are only partly there, somewhat like a magician’s now-you-see-it, nowyou- don’t feint. Made of reflective stainless steel and enclosed by a wire trellis threaded with vines and leaves, the pillars were created by Sandra Muss, an artist based in Washington DC, New York, and the Berkshires.
Fluidity and Fixedness: A Conversation with Richard Deacon
Richard Deacon deliberates over a conversation as though it could become a physical object pinned together by ideas, treating words almost like buildings blocks for a sculpture. He explains everything as part of a process and sees materials and language as the elemental skin and bones of his sculptures, allowing them to make contact with
Nnenna Okore
SAN FRANCISCO Jenkins Johnson Gallery In the Igbo language of Nigeria, “Osimili,” the title of Nnenna Okore’s recent show, means a huge body of water. Okore, who spent most of her childhood in Nigeria (she was born in Australia), is now a professor of art at North Park University in Chicago. After graduating from the University of Nigeria in 1999 with a BA in painting, she received her MA and MFA from the University of Iowa in 2004 and 2005.
Vincent Fecteau: Submerged Forces
In The Shape of Time, anthropologist George Kubler organizes a history of objects and ideas from the perspective of innovation, replication, and mutation from an original, a “prime object.” Such prime objects can’t be reduced to something else; they arise from deep needs, not fashion, and they are fundamental to their specific function.
Urs Fischer
SAN FRANCISCO Legion of Honor/Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco Artists’ interventions in museum collections come in many forms, but their purpose is often to bring new meaning and resonance to objects that are so familiar as to have become almost invisible. Though Urs Fischer’s contemporary perspective on the Legion of Honor’s permanent collection thrilled some visitors while horrifying others, director Max Hollein’s decision to invite Fischer and his subversions brought a definite liveliness into the Legion’s neoclassical marble halls.
Alice Aycock: Systems of Energy
Alice Aycock was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2018. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Alice Aycock’s recent works bristle with an iconic energy. Curving tendrils of aluminum in dynamic repetition, like Futurist force lines freed from the canvas, erupt from the earth with propulsive power.
Jessi Reaves
PHILADELPHIA Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania In Jessi Reaves’s recent exhibition, her sculptural furniture was integrated both formally and functionally with a group of surreal still-life paintings by fellow New Yorker Ginny Casey. Curator Charlotte Ickes described these complementary bodies of work as “two solo exhibitions.” The juxtaposition with Casey’s intensely colored paintings of unfinished objects and hovering body parts set in cavernous ateliers placed Reaves’s work within a context of conversations about the artist’s studio and the erotics of the psychoanalytic part-object.
Epiphanies of the Moment: Lisa Seebach
Lisa Seebach, a German artist whose home studio is about an hour away from Berlin, spent the better part of 2017 as a resident at the International Studio & Curatorial Program (ISCP), a nonprofit space in East Williamsburg in Brooklyn.
Temporary Completion: A Conversation with Lizi Sánchez
As much about persuasion as indulgence, objects of desire depend on packaging and material matter for their allure. For London-based, Peruvian-born Lizi Sánchez, the careful design decisions made by conglomerates lead us to experience the world differently.
