“Upside down” is one way to describe Alex Sanson’s thought-provoking approach to art. In fact, he offers a fascinating case study for artists seeking a financially sustainable business model and a wider customer base. His practice of placing works beyond narrow art capitals and the professionalized art world infrastructure is also inspiring.
Thinking Space: A Conversation with Bernard Williams
Bernard Williams investigates the complexities of American history and culture through painting, sculpture, and installation. Within these broad arenas, his work seeks a kind of open-ended dialogue, addressing identity, flattening hierarchies, and questioning who we are collectively.
Not Hidden, Not Evident: A Conversation with Mirta Kupferminc
The daughter of immigrants—Auschwitz survivors—Mirta Kupferminc was born in Argentina. Because the family had lost every material belonging that might help their children to re-create their past before the war, Kupferminc grew up nurturing her spirit with stories and memories that shaped her life and art and established her interest in human rights.
Surrendering to the Common Life: A Conversation with Cristina Rodrigues
In situ, Cristina Rodrigues’s works read like fanciful relics. Lavishing baroque details over ordinary objects, she masterfully mixes virtuosity with the commonplace. Adventures into the sublime, her installations are as universal in their significance as they are local in their inspiration, purposefully touching the lives of everyone involved.
Illuminating Illusions: A Conversation with Iván Navarro
Iván Navarro’s activities this past year—participation in a summer 2014 show at the Guggenheim Museum, a new Skira Rizzoli book Iván Navarro, his “This Land is Your Land” exhibition in Madison Square Park, shows at Hotel Particulier in Manhattan and Galerie Hyundai in Seoul, and his electronic, minimal music CD Oido (Huseo Records)—suggest diversity, fluency,
Bradley Wester
NEW YORK Pavel Zoubok Gallery Bradley Wester, best known as a painter and printmaker, has pushed his two-dimensional works into three dimensions, making sculpture out of what might have originally been paintings. A New Orleans native, he celebrates the city’s famed Mardi Gras and glitzy nightlife with works incorporating disco balls and glitter. For Wester, who lived for a long time in New York and now resides in Bristol, Rhode Island, this exhibition paid homage, not only to the glamor of New Orleans, but also to his memories of the gay community there.
Hyemin Lee
NEW YORK Art Mora Hyemin Lee’s recent show “White Shadow” filled both rooms of the Art Mora gallery in Chelsea. The large front room featured works from her “Plaster Bandages” series, which consists of relief sculptures made from plaster bandages arranged in rows. After breaking her arm, Lee was treated with a plaster covering, and she later decided to use the material as a means of building vividly textured surfaces.
Jeppe Hein
NEW YORK 303 Gallery “All We Need is Inside,” the name of Jeppe Hein’s third exhibition at 303 Gallery, was also the title of a work that set a strong thematic precedent for the exhibition. All We Need is Inside consists of a two-way mirror, with neon lettering behind it spelling out the title. Viewers seeing their reflection are alerted to the immediacy of their presence within the communal space of the gallery and in relation to adjacent works. Confronting viewers with their own image is a recurring dynamic in Hein’s practice.
Tara Donovan
NEW YORK Pace Gallery Drawing seems a misnomer for Tara Donovan’s new two-dimensional works. The 14 works, all titled Drawing (Pins), were created with a method that she began using in 2009 and date from 2011 to the present. For each piece, Donovan pressed hundreds of thousands of straight pins into painted white Gator Boards to create simple geometric shapes divided into bands of gray: circles, squares, diamonds and crosses. While the works are sold individually, most of them fall into pairs that offer both the positive and inverse of a given shape in grayscale.
Yoan Capote
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery Yoan Capote is among the politically conscious artists currently enjoying eased constraints in Cuba, where Fidel Castro, in 1959, established a Communist regime 90 miles from the U.S. coast. With his pulse attuned to his native culture and his heart beating at a free-world pace, Capote treads terrain still hot-wired with reprisals for dissidence. His works, strongly rooted in local tradition, grow to universal proportions as he deftly detours around homegrown maladies to project his message onto a global stage.
