NEW YORK Paul Kasmin Gallery Chess Figures (1944), the wooden chess set that Max Ernst made while vacationing in Great River, Long Island, greeted visitors to “Max Ernst/Paramyths: Sculpture, 1934– 1967.” Like Marcel Duchamp, Ernst was a player of a game that conscripts intellectual wit to commandeer abstract warriors through never-ending configurations of battle. It’s play, but serious play, and that’s precisely how Ernst regarded his sculptural output—as a spirited interlude to overcome creative block.
Pablo Picasso
NEW YORK Museum of Modern Art Eighty years of Modernist bombast has masked Picasso’s work in hyperbole, diminishing comprehension and neglecting what’s most interesting about it. At this point in time, Picasso’s two-dimensional work is cliché, but his three-dimensional work astonishes. It is insanely compulsive, almost hallucinogenic. Immense biomorphic and figurative abstractions; bulbous, florid surfaces; huge bronzes impressed with irrational patterns; diagrammatic metal structures that resemble folded paper; steel cages—an enormous body of work that’s almost incomprehensible in its variety.
Rodrigo Valenzuela
SALT LAKE CITY CUAC Contemporary Art As presidential candidates muddle around in the public arena, failing to articulate a humane approach to immigration, the American public is left to wonder: Who else can take up the baton and defend the basic rights of migrant workers? We’ve all heard how laborers—from Mexican fruit pickers to Vietnamese salon workers—undertake perilous journeys only to face a profusion of obstacles once here. Perhaps most disconcerting is the apathy of the people around them.
Gregory Miguel Gómez & Rodrigo Nava
BRATTLEBORO, VT
Shawn Smith
ARLINGTON VIRGINIA Artisphere What is our relationship to the digital, and how is the digital impacting us? The answer for Shawn Smith is one pixel at a time. In his recent show, “Pixels, Predators, and Prey,” Smith mapped out the interaction between the natural and the digital, the real and the simulated, in 10 eye-popping sculptures of animals and, for the first time, humans. In his hands, clusters of painted wood sticks mutate into their subjects— a kind of 21st-century, dimensional pointillism on steroids.
Valérie Blass
VANCOUVER Catriona Jeffries One of the rewards of looking at contemporary art, and at sculpture in particular, is the opportunity to track, for want of a better description, the genealogy of the field and its many innovations. More than any other art form, sculpture deserves the historical distinction of being the most adaptive and experimental of artistic disciplines—if today’s sculpture seems set on redefining itself, it is in keeping with a longstanding tradition. Of late, it appears that artists are being mindful of the key formal and stylistic tropes of Modernism.
Simple Actions: A Conversation with Phyllida Barlow
Phyllida Barlow, one of the U.K.’s most prolific sculptors, creates large-scale installations that involve a process of crushing, wrapping, stretching, stacking, and rolling. Her practice is one of production and deconstruction, and she uses readily available materials, often discarding or recycling them for new projects.
Danh Vo
COLOGNE Museum Ludwig “Ydob eht ni mraw si ti,” the title of Danh Vo’s recent exhibition, was first growled in 1973 by a satanically possessed girl in The Exorcist. The phrase also represents the backward spelling of “It is warm in the body.” No medium or material typified the works in the show, but a strategic scattering of the photographs of Peter Hujar (1934–87) amplified Vo’s extended lament about human suffering. We the People, a 20-foot-tall, copper-plated iteration of Lady Liberty’s draped armpit, was the largest sculptural object.
Anne Chu: Making Sense of Cultural Chaos
Anne Chu is a mid-career, New York-based sculptor and painter whose work reflects many years of familiarity with the city’s art museums. Her parents came from China—her father was a mathematics professor at Columbia University—yet she does not identify closely with Chinese culture.
Aiden Salakhova
LONDON Saatchi Gallery Aidan Salakhova, known as Aidan, is a forthright, confident artist. Since 1989, when the USSR was suddenly and quite bloodlessly dismantled, she has established a large and dedicated following as one of the key protagonists in Moscow’s contemporary art scene. She was born into the city’s cultural elite: her father, Tahir Salahov, was and is a major artist living in Moscow. Her parents originate from oil-rich Azerbaijan, where East and West meet, and where the overwhelming majority of the population is Muslim. Aidan’s work expresses a growing awareness of herself as a desiring woman shaking off suppression.
