NEW YORK Jane Lombard Gallery Entering the world of Tokyo-based sculptor Teppei Kaneuji is like walking into a funky workshop gone awry. Quirky combinations of tools, surreal arrangements of household objects on barbecue grills, towers of Claes Oldenburg knock-offs, and black and white stuffed toys collide to create a phantasmagoria of color and action.
Choong Sup Lim
NEW YORK Korea Society Choong Sup Lim is a highly accomplished Korean-born artist who has lived and worked in New York since 1973. His work offers a marked contrast to the notion of materialism so rampantly displayed in the so-called art fairs that have displaced the spiritual concept in art, a concept that Lim understands as indigenous to the culture of his homeland. Luna—Thousand Rivers & Thousand Reflections (2015), a room-size installation, consists of traditional Korean cotton thread (1,000 yards), rice paper (hanji), wax, wood, a kinetic system to move the thread, and a DVD projection.
James Siena
NEW YORK Pace Gallery James Siena’s extensive show of large and small, intricate sculptures in wood and metal seemed very much like an essay in structure. In an interview with Julia Schwartz for Figure/Ground, Siena acknowledged the influence of open-wire works of art: “I met Alan Saret early in my years in New York and was tremendously moved by his light-permeable wire sculptures.” While the range of sculpture in Siena’s exhibition was broad, both in size and materials (bronze, cherry wood, bamboo), the fabrication process was close to identical: sticks are attached to the ends of other sticks, the connections building an open design in which light and space are as important as the construction itself.
Christopher Wool
NEW YORK Luhring Augustine Christopher Wool’s 2013 show at the Guggenheim Museum didn’t seem terribly convincing. It is likely that many viewers found the paintings uninspired and stylistically repetitive. But his sculptures, which mostly consist of curved, bronze tubular lines, look more interesting. Wool’s three-dimensional works reference New York School painting as much as they consider the current state of American sculpture. Still, his work has to justify itself on a contemporary basis rather than an archival one.
Susan Fitzsimmons
EDINBURG, TEXAS Dorothy Charles Clark Gallery “Sentinels and Guardians,” an exhibition of bronze sculptures by Susan Fitzsimmons at the Clark Gallery of the University of Texas in Edinburg (where Fitzsimmons is a professor and chair of the art department), presented an engaging paradox. Bronze casting is a highly skilled as well as physically demanding discipline and requires careful planning. Traditionally, hot molten bronze is poured into a wax-filled mold, then packed in sand as it cools and solidifies. In the process, the wax is burned out, revealing the form.
Leo Saul Berk
SEATTLE Frye Art Museum Leo Saul Berk’s recent exhibition “Structure and Ornament” featured a series of sculptural installations commissioned by the Frye Art Museum and Frye Foundation. In an unusually apt interface between an artist and the museum’s permanent collection of 19th-century German art, director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker linked Berk’s variations on his childhood home (eccentric architect Bruce Goff’s Ford House in Aurora, Illinois) to the Frye’s substantial holdings of the multi-disciplinary Munich Secession.
Rita Simoni
BUENOS AIRES Zafarrancho I have been following the work of the Argentine artist Rita Simoni for many years, and I must confess that it still surprises me. Her work offers a clear example of a skill that can’t be ignored by contemporary artists—the ability to adapt to a specific environment using as many stylistic devices and supports as needed. Architect, photographer, visual artist, Simoni can move from the two-dimensional to installation, from an artist’s book to 3D digital design; there are no limits for her. Humectaria took place in an unconventional, almost unthinkable, and even hostile space.
Sculpture by the Sea
AARHUS, DENMARK Next year, “Sculpture by the Sea” in Australia will celebrate its 20th anniversary. The brainchild of David Handley, “Sculpture by the Sea” was conceived as a free exhibition, arranged along a spectacular stretch of coastline at Bondi Beach and designed to attract both a popular audience and art professionals. The Sydney show now draws about half a million visitors annually and generates about $1 million in sales, making it one of Australia’s most significant art events.
Dispatch: Kara Walker at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Domino Sugar Factory, and Sikkema Jenkins & Co.
Kara Walker operates in the liminal—that in-between space of overlap and displacement at the border and on the margins—intent on undermining and transcending fixed definitions and domains of difference. Whether in the form of cut-out silhouettes, for which she first gained recognition, or in more recent projects, including an exhibition that she organized for the
Hunting for Stone: A Conversation with Lee Ufan
A fascinating book published in 2014 by the Fondazione Mudima in Milan documents Lee Ufan’s wanderings through the environs of Lombardy in search of stones—boulders, in fact—to be used as components in his “Relatum” series, along with plates of steel.
