KASSEL AND MUNSTER Skulptur Projekte Munster Summer 2017 marked an art world trifecta, the Venice Biennale coinciding with Documenta (held every five years) and Skulptur Projekte Münster (held every 10 years). In Kassel and Münster, what began as modest municipal undertakings to reconnect postwar Germany with the global art community have become internationally recognized for their influence. Sources of great civic pride, these shows depart from Venice and the art fair model with their refreshing non-commercial slant.
Second Skins: A Conversation with Marcela Astorga
Marcela Astorga, an Argentine artist born in the province of Mendoza, creates work with both visual and conceptual impact. For the last 20 years, she has used art as a means to face issues of importance to her: violence, memory, identity, and construction/deconstruction as represented through architecture, as well as the marks that we leave
A Conversation with Sam Durant: Political Art Has Consequences
Los Angeles artist Sam Durant is accustomed to shining a spotlight on the sins of the world in his installations, sculptures, and gallery-sized drawings and photographs, but recently the spotlight turned on him. The creator of End White Supremacy (2008) and Proposal for White and Indian Dead Monument Transpositions (2005) found himself under attack by
In Search of Resonance: A Conversation with Susan Philipsz
Scottish artist Susan Philipsz has worked with sound for years, but her background is in sculpture. For her, the two fields have been intertwined from the beginning. When studying sculpture at the Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design, University of Dundee, in the early 1990s, she contemplated the physicality of producing sound, how
Working the Devil Out: Mitch Mitchell
Historically, sculpture has been an influence more than it has been influenced, though that changed with Modernism, when sculptors began to turn to other media, primarily painting, for inspiration. From Picasso, with the collage and Cubism, and Marcel Duchamp, with the readymade, to a host of color field and Abstract Expressionists, 20th century abstract sculpture
A Conversation with Richard Nonas: Telling it Slant
Richard Nonas’s studio, a Wunderkammer piled high with artifacts and relics, as well as past and in-progress works, unfolds with the unexpected surprises of an archaeological dig. Hunkered down within a jungle of antique vises and drills, ladders, chains, axes, arbitrarily stacked books, pulleys, rugs, handmade kayaks, and countless constructions of wood and steel are
Making Chaos Legible: A Conversation with Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew’s newest and largest work to date, Number 197 (on view through October 29), activates and energizes the atrium of the de Young Museum in San Francisco with an orchestrated arrangement of wall-mounted sculptural elements.
Dispatch: Venice Biennale
VENICE Venice Biennale Christine Macel, curator of the Centre Pompidou and of “Viva Arte Viva,” the 57th International Exhibition, describes art as a force for life: “Art in itself helps us to navigate in these times; its very existence is a resistance in itself… Contemporary art cannot be understood as mere representation or imitation: it is a reality tout court, an instrument of inquiry, both of the creative process and of the different questions pertaining to Humankind and the world.”
“Juxtapoz x Superflat”
VANCOUVER Vancouver Art Gallery “Juxtapoz x Superflat,” a group exhibition of 36 international artists organized by Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd and co-curated by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Evan Pricco, editor-in-chief of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, premiered as a four-day pop-up show at Pivot Art + Culture in Seattle; it then had a three-month run at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Marisa Merz
NEW YORK The Met Breuer “The Sky is a Great Space” emphasized the consistency behind Marisa Merz’s body of work over chronology, starting with the larger-than-life “Living Sculpture” series (1966) at the exhibition entrance. These giant slinky-toy-like aluminum sheets hung from the ceiling in curls, spirals, and amorphous dangling “bodies”–most (excepting a wrapped armchair and a tent-like shape) without antecedent as “forms.” Breath alone could make them sway.
