DENVER Museum of Contemporary Art Laura Shill works across media, maximalist artist operating at the intersection of collecting, costuming, performance, installation, and photography. For her first solo museum exhibition, curated by Nora Burnett Abrams, Shill sprawled “Phantom Touch” across nearly the entire second floor of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. Building on a tradition of soft sculpture from a feminist perspective, she ambitiously stretched her practice – and broke some museum “rules” in the process.
Tom Sachs
SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts In the world of art-speak, some words are used to the point of nonsense – “liminal” was one, not so long ago – while others, though perennially revived, manage to retain some kind of meaning. “Bricolage,” as used by Tom Sachs to describe his method of working, seems to fall into this latter category. Virtually all of the objects in his sprawling recent exhibition (Sachs is the only artist ever to have filled YBCA’s cavernous first-floor galleries with a solo show) were united by their method of manufacture and the philosophy behind it: the bricoleur’s practice of cobbling something together out of a diverse assortment of available materials.
Hanne Darboven
LOS ANGELES Spruth Magers Hanne Darboven describes her methodology as “writing without describing.” Her enormous installations are encyclopedic in nature, densely packing walls from floor to ceiling. Viewers of her difficult and challenging works have multiple alternatives for comprehending her vision. It may be dismissed as opaque and recherché. It can be read as brilliant Minimalist innovation, the residue of specific conceptual choices.
Himmat Shah
NEW DELHI Kiran Nadar Museum of Art Himmat Shah’s recent retrospective formed one third of a three-part showcase at the Kiran Nadar Museum. Like the other two artists featured in “Abstraction in Indian Modern Art 1960s Onwards,” Nasreen Mohammedi and Jeram Patel, Shah is associated with the Faculty of Fine Arts Baroda. His show, “Hammer on the Square,” considered his prolific output from 1957 to 2015. The title work, Hammer on the Square, consists of an unpretentious cube and a hammer with no hand holding it.
Dennis Maher
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory Dennis Maher is an artist, architect, and educator whose undertakings over the past 15 years have focused on the process of deconstruction and reconstitution. For years, he has been investigating an art/architectural method of building that involves demolition, renovation, and restoration. Using a variety of media, including drawing, photography, collage, video, sound, and light, he creates works that appear to intertwine order and chaos.
John Monti
NEW YORK Grace Building The works in John Monti’s recent series “Beauties,” or more casually “flower clusters,” touch on elements of Surrealism associated with Kurt Seligmann or Joan Miró. With their heightened organic levity, these unique individuals might be seen as intertwined flora and fauna – plantlike entities given over to a spontaneous bursting forth into quizzical, unexpected forms with an alien presence. Less humanoid than cunningly eerie inhabitants of another world, their weird organs remain isolated, as if discovered in a lost spacecraft hovering between turbulent galaxies.
Renee Stout: Formal Divination
The quiet nuances on the surface of Renee Stout’s work are just the tip of the iceberg, though the subterranean rumblings may be hard to decipher without a fundamental knowledge of Yoruba, Vodoun, and Hoodoo culture.
“Generations”
AUSTIN Russel Collection Fine Art Gallery Every art historian knows that art is born from art, and yet critics and curators persist in celebrating the lone genius, seemingly sprung from nowhere and preferably having already succumbed to a tragic death. So it is a special pleasure to review this legacy exhibition of Charles Umlauf (1911–94) and four of his children – his sons, Arthur and Karl, and two daughters, Madelon and Lynn. ambiguities. Wall, paper, and canvas become multiple layers of skin, adhering to and peeling away from each other and constantly reforming.
Kristján Gudmundsson
HELSINKI Galerie Anhava A strikingly potent, yet ultimately illusory air of reticence pervaded “Olympic Drawings,” a show highlighting Kristján Gudmundsson’s discerning series of recent sculptures and a carefully selected handful of related works. Their singularly reductive style evades facile interpretation. This frequently induces consternation in gallery-goers, who are faced with familiar objects situated in contexts that thwart expectations and offer no obvious clues as to how they could or should be read.
Iakovos Volkov: In Forgotten Places
On the edges of the Greek urban landscape, in neglected and abandoned buildings, Iakovos Volkov composes eloquent, cerebral sculptures. Made of discarded materials that he finds and reimagines, his works give meaning to spaces that have lost relevance, environments scarred by a lacerated economy.
