NEW YORK Denise Bibro Fine Art American artist Mark Hadjipateras, of Greek background and now based mostly in Athens, recently put up a terrific show of grisaille paintings and stained aluminum sculptures. The latter are particularly strong, continuing his long-established practice of whimsical artifact. Behind the playfulness, however, viewers will find a formal intelligence that links Hadjipateras in spirit, if not exactly in form, to some of the Modernists, specifically Calder and Jean Arp.
Agnes Denes
NEW YORK Socrates Sculpture Park he Living Pyramid, recently installed at Socrates Sculpture Park, marked Agnes Denes’s first major New York environmental statement in art since 1982, when she constructed the fabled Wheatfield—A Confrontation, a two-acre site of wheat growing only two blocks from Wall Street. This time, her motif was not so directly adversarial. The Living Pyramid was dedicated to David Rockefeller on the occasion of his 100th birthday for his interest in art and the environment; it looks like Denes has made her peace with the captains of industry.
Leigh Hall
BOSTON Atlantic Works Gallery The Atlantic Works Gallery, at the edge of Boston Harbor, occupies the top floor of a repurposed building that was once part of the East Boston shipping industry. Leigh Hall, the sculptor of the two-person exhibition “Metaphors and Metamorphoses” (which also included the assemblages of Suzanne Mercury), combed the streets of the surrounding industrial neighborhood for many of the materials included in the show. Hall uses a combination of needlework techniques to stitch together found pieces of metal wire of different thicknesses.
Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle
SANTA MONICA, CALIFORNIA Christopher Grimes Gallery “Well 34°01’03”N–118°29’12”W,” the title of Iñigo Manglano-Ovalle’s recent exhibition, represents the coordinates of the Grimes Gallery’s location in Santa Monica, introducing a multi-part work that required consideration of the geographical, social, economic, and political dimensions of water. The installation itself was titled P’oe 34°01’03”N—118°29’12”W. P’oe means “gift” in Tewa, the indigenous language of the Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico; the numbers indicate the coordinates of a well dug there in 2014. P’oe was clinical in its stark minimality.
14th Istanbul Biennial
ISTANBUL Saltwater As a migration crisis unfolded in Turkey (refugees on rubber rafts were trying to reach Greece from the Turkish coast), a biennial titled “Saltwater” seemed an amazing coincidence. But innocuous as the title appeared, the theme encompassed political, spiritual, mystical, and scientific metaphors reaching back into history through the present and into the future. “Tuzlu su” (“Saltwater”) featured venues that could not be seen, installations in obscure locations, and ferry trips to the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara and up the Bosphorus.
Roberley Bell and Boston Sculptors
STOCKBRIDGE, MA Chesterwood Margaret French wrote a line or two a day in the diaries that she kept in the early 20th century. French was the only child of Mary and Daniel Chester French, the sculptor best known for the Lincoln Memorial. He and his wife and daughter spent as much time as possible at his Berkshire summer estate, Chesterwood, until his death in 1931. Margaret’s entries in the diaries were terse and factual. On August 9, 1905, she wrote: “Went down to the store in morning. Played tennis in aft. And drove over to Stockbridge.
Gianluca Bianchino: Dispersing Form and Energy
Gianluca Bianchino has quietly made a name for himself as a sculptor in New York area circles. He has done so despite the fact that his studio remains in New Jersey; although, as he points out, he has made a point of moving closer to New York City, holding a studio first in Montclair—he received
Unnatural Histories of the Natural: A Conversation with Tomer Sapir
In July 2008, an animal carcass of unknown identity washed up on the shores of Ditch Plains, New York. This object, which became known as the “Montauk Monster,” has proved to be a major catalyst in the evolution of Tomer Sapir’s work.
Creative and Destructive Force: A Conversation with Andrea Mastrovito
Deep wisdom meets true child-like creativity in Andrea Mastrovito’s work. Eternal human questions-Who are we? From where do we come? Where are we going?-are raised and developed with honest simplicity, the only answer lying in an acceptance of the natural life cycle.
Dorie Millerson: The Matter of Scale
Think of string—of textiles—used in a sculptural way, and chances are you’ll hearken back to Eva Hesse and fiberglass-coated string pieces like Right After (1969) untidily looping down into space from hooks suspended in the ceiling; or what Lucy Lippard termed its “ugly” antecedent, Untitled (1970), an abstract snarl of latex-coated rope and string that
