PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory On Friday, June 17, 2016, William Peduto, the mayor of Pittsburgh, flipped the switch to unveil the Mattress Factory’s new light commission, Acupuncture, a permanent public art installation created by German artist Hans Peter Kuhn. Berlin-based Kuhn is an ingenious self-taught artist and composer who makes large-scale, site-specific light and sound environments for public spaces.
Jessica Stockholder
NEW YORK Mitchell-Innes & Nash Though Jessica Stockholder is known for both freestanding sculptures and works that extend from the wall into space, she introduced an interactive component into her recent exhibition. Taking over almost half of a large gallery space, the title work, The Guests All Crowded Into the Dining Room, fused aspects of sculpture and painting with an active experience of viewing. Biomorphic shapes rendered in vibrant colors were transformed into a large stage and platform. Meanwhile, each viewer’s individual engagement with the work helped to make it responsive to constant flux-Stockholder’s sculptural rendition of an ephemeral moment.
Cornelia Parker
NEW YORK Metropolitan Museum of Art The big buzz surrounding Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (Psycho Barn) on the Met roof was well-deserved. The family-friendly art experience offered up visual clues in many directions. Though the Hitchcock film Psycho (1960) is in black and white, Parker’s scaled-down (three-quarters actual size), blood-red version of the Bates house had many of the same features, including the wagon-wheel wood scallops on the porch and an oculus on the steeply sloped Mansard roof. Like its inspiration, Parker’s object was only the front of a house.
Pablo Garcia Lopez
BEACON, NEW YORK Catalyst Gallery Pablo Garcia Lopez is like a modern-day Bernini, sculpting baroque figures in cast natural silk, rather than marble, to create exquisite and contradictory sculptures. Exploiting the sensuousness of spun-silk, he sets that soft fleshiness against the sharp steel of surgical implements to shock and fascinate. In Wedding Cake with Pietà Topper, Garcia Lopez uses band-saw blades with upright teeth to define the five tiers of the “cake,” which is topped by Michelangelo’s well-known image of Mary holding the body of Christ.
David Hammons
NEW YORK Mnuchin Gallery Over the decades, David Hammons’s aesthetic originality has maintained relevance through his oblique use of materials and subtle manner of transmitting meaning through seemingly incongruous, yet fertile combinations of objets trouvés. There are many examples, ranging from rock and hair sculptures to vibrantly lyrical Kool-Aid paintings and his rugged use of black rubber, fabric, concrete, and steel, not to mention his snowballs and paintings concealed by tarpaulins.
Diane Simpson: Fashioning
Clothes are the skin over the skin of the body. Although one is manufactured and the other biological, both are theorized constructions. Objectively speaking, the body is a succession of stacked parts that vary conceptually in terms of emotive emphasis: head, neck, torso, hips, genitals, legs, feet.
Jill Bonovitz: Drawing Form
Jill Bonovitz, an artist with an intensely personal aesthetic sensibility, is known for her idiosyncratic ceramic sculptures. The matte opacity and restrained color of her glaze gives each object a visual weight and substance, despite its small scale.
Very Serious Play A Conversation with Jess Benjamin
Nebraska-born sculptor Jess Benjamin creates work with an austere sensibility and eloquent narrative that is inextricably tied to the land—more specifically to the water—of her home state. The daughter of a rancher, she earned her BFA in ceramics from Hastings College before working as a studio assistant for Jun Kaneko and then earning an MFA
Words and Silence: A Conversation with Cécile Andrieu
Cécile Andrieu seduces viewers with forms influenced by three decades spent living and working in Japan. Using shredded dictionaries to give a material emphasis to different languages, her work comments on the state of global affairs, frictions between East and West, and inter-Asian relations.
How Things Malfunction: A Conversation with Eduardo Abaroa
Eduardo Abaroa’s work has taken many twists and turns over the years, from the monument-like Portable Broken Obelisk for Outdoor Markets (1991-93) to the curiously functional and intimate Fragments for human hands VI (2009), to the spectacular Total destruction of the Anthropology Museum (2012) and the surreal and hypnotic Great Oxygen Catastrophe (2015).
