NEW YORK LMAKgallery Four pretzel-like, inflated tubular shapes hung just overhead in a backyard “garden,” held in place by clear monofilament fishing line. Colored yellow, pink, red, and light blue, each form ranged between three and four feet in size. The red one, Voice Inversion, revealed the most complex entanglement of inverted twists, forming a continuous Möbius strip of sorts. Though the other forms were completely monochromatic, the red piece featured a transparent section. These works might be thought of as super weird beach balls—a good selection for a summer show.
Renee Magnanti
NEW YORK Art Mora Renee Magnanti is a highly gifted artist who carves encaustic to reveal layers of wax, often with a brightly hued background. Her work relates to the women’s decorative art movement, part of the feminist art drive of the 1970s and ’80s, when she was recently out of art school. Her carvings frequently include phrases or sentences about women from the faraway textile cultures whose patterns she sometimes borrows. Inevitably, her work brings up the question of craft and the long clichéd debate over whether decorative art can be taken seriously.
Dennis Oppenheim
NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Over a long and productive career, Dennis Oppenheim produced conceptual art, body art, earthworks, and sculpture. Now, five years after his death, the many phases of his artistic life are being celebrated as never before, in a perfect setting. His evolution from performance artist to creator of land projects and sculptural installations has found full-scale realization at Storm King Art Center (through November 13). Grassy fields accommodate several land projects, originally designed in the 1960s and positioned outdoors for the first time.
Mags Harries
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Gallery and Gallery Kayafas Mags Harries’s recent Boston exhibitions attacked complacency toward the mounting consequences of melting polar ice. She charmed viewers with familiar nautical forms, wittily anthropomorphized, mimicking other materials, or inverted in scale. The shows included found and cast objects, installations, videos, and a series of digital prints and three-dimensional reproductions. Seductiveness alternated with terror, as we perceived the actors’ imminent peril to be our own.
Yașam Șașmazer
TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA Torrance Art Museum In art, the task of the body is to perform some signifying act of emotion; the representation of this act has been sculpture’s job for centuries. As ideas regarding representation have evolved, the kind of emotion and the nature of the body on display have varied with the prevailing culture. Forty years ago, when artists’ resistance to theater and narrative disappeared, the revival of figuration produced an ongoing critique of history and civilization expressed through the figure. Yașam Șașmazer’s critique involves a dramatic, noir-esque enactment of anomie—a vision of the body as emptied out, gutted by experience.
The Narrative is in the Unknowing: A Conversation with Tim Shaw
Tim Shaw, who was born in Belfast, has lived in the south of England for the past 25 years, on a farm that serves as both his home and studio. In 2013, he was elected to the Royal Academy and to the Royal British Society of Sculptors.
Regina José Galindo: Acts of Endurance
Regina José Galindo’s performances are often shocking and degrading. Sometimes naked, she is tasered, hit, bloodied, anesthetized, urinated on, or left for dead. “Bearing Witness,” at North Carolina’s David son College last fall, was Galindo’s first solo show in the United States.
Linda Fleming: At the Edge of the Unknown
Linda Fleming is always thinking about light—how it moves through, over, and around her work. In conversation, she points out how the play of cast shadows echoes and enlivens the complex, latticed surfaces and curving forms of her sculptures, which range from paper and wood maquettes only a few inches across to powder-coated, lasercut steel
Gisela Colón: Light Effects
It’s a hot, California autumn day when I make the trek out to a Los Angeles valley to meet the second-generation Light and Space artist, Gisela Colón. Her studio, located in an industrial park, is a warehouse space, once home to a plastic manufacturer and a befitting locale for an artist whose preferred medium is
Andrew Lyght: Charting Spatial Wonders
Guyana (which means “land of many waters”) is a small tropical country of variegated rivers wedged between Venezuela, Suriname, and Brazil. Its capital, Georgetown, is perched on the nation’s broad northern coastline, facing a vast expanse of sea and sky.
