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.
Joan Giordano
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.
