NEW YORK June Kelly Gallery Joan Giordano’s recent exhibition “Woven in Time” spoke to both the history of art and postmodern phenomena. Her constructions, which straddle the boundaries of painting, collage, and sculpture, can be compared to Kurt Schwitters’s “Merz” Her process begins when she selects an issue from the global news and prints the sometimes-illustrated article on heavy-weight archival watercolor paper to preserve it, before rolling, twisting, and/or scorching it. By soaking the paper, she is able to shape it into dimensional forms directly on the wall, which she combines with other materials before painting the entire composition.
Sinister Beauty: A Conversation with Gabriel Valansi
Though Gabriel Valansi is internationally known as a photographer, it’s hard to define him as such. The monumental scale of his work, its nontraditional approach to installation, and the interaction between different elements far exceed the limits of photography, generating an a priori spatial disposition more akin to sculpture.
Sam Jaffe: Interdisciplinary Opportunism
Sam Jaffe constructs uncompromising sculptures from yarn and fabric, giving form to soft materials, often by knitting or sewing. These works are bold efforts, enhanced by an authoritative use of color, with a defined point of view.
Joe Fyfe
NEW YORK Nathalie Karg Gallery “Kiss the Sky,” Joe Fyfe’s recent exhibition, was a tour-de-force, seamlessly merging bright colors and quotidian materials, including steel, plastic, nylon, fabric, found wood, ink, rope, acrylic, and crayon. With some sculptures zigzagging down the middle of the long gallery, the show created a sort of color field so that the space itself became an active player in the interaction of mass, color, and movement. It’s obvious that Fyfe’s works merge collage, painting, and sculpture with a nod to architecture.
Konstantinos Stamatiou: In Praise of Junk
Greek-born sculptor Konstantinos Stamatiou, who divides his time between Athens and New York, works with throwaway materials such as plastic, Styrofoam, and cut drinking straws, following the path established by Arte Povera, in which a “poor art” is constructed of humble elements (Jannis Kounellis, a sculptor of Greek origin, is an important practitioner of Arte
Ed Parrish, Jr.
PITTSBURGH The Irma Freeman Center for Imagination Iron, written in the stars, holds the earth together deep within its core. It glides through the bloodstream, lustrous, magnetic, essential to existence. In Ed Parrish, Jr.’s hands, this elemental metal seems palpably alive. His sculptures embody iron’s molten volatility, cooled into austere, meditative forms that describe a dynamic cosmos while creating moments of revelatory quiet. Assemblage, iron casting, and painting merge in works that appear otherworldly – as if from a place of mysterious possibilities – yet feel intimate, full of familiar, sensual elements.
Fighting Gravity: A Conversation with Tony Cragg
Tony Cragg was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2017. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Tony Cragg’s new works – contortions of wood, metal, and stone perfectly manipulated by man and machine – represent a kind of beauty as close to nature and as far removed from Modernist
Maurizio Cattelan
NEW YORK Guggenheim Museum Latrine, potty, WC, john, head, loo, privy, throne-polite epithets for the lowly toilet-are feeble descriptions for the plumbing fixture when it achieves high art honors, as it does with Maurizio Cattelan’s America, a fully functioning, 18-karat-gold replica of a commercial Kohler model. Set inside the Guggenheim’s fifth floor unisex lavatory and accorded the same egalitarian public access as its more accessibly priced porcelain cousins, it transcends all prior notions of performance and interactive art.
Amie McNeel, Mark Zirpel, and Sam Stubblefield
SEATTLE MadArt MadArt founder Allison Milliman wants to demystify the process of creating art by bringing it into the community. Artists, who are invited to imagine and create in a massive 4,000-square-foot space with 23-foot-high ceilings, work in full view of the street, visible through large sliding glass doors that encourage obsessed techies (this is the Amazon zone of Seattle) and other members of the public to observe or participate in the artistic process.
“Not All That Falls Has Wings”
ISTANBUL ARTER “Not All That Falls Has Wings,” a group exhibition of works by Bas Jan Ader, Phyllida Barlow, Ryan Gander, Mikhail Karikis and Uriein Orlow, Cyprien Gaillard, VOID, and Anne Wenzel, considered the act of falling as an earthly condition. Curator Selen Ansen selected works focused on the “productive dimension of falling” in which, “rather than sublimating reality,” the artistic gesture seeks “to create the conditions for dealing with the surface, and coming to terms with the bottom.”
