No marble or bronze for sculptor David Mach. For over 35 years, he has been transforming bulk raw materials and what many consider junk or garbage—old tires, magazines, out-of-date telephone directories, empty bottles, Barbie dolls, postcards, coat hangers, and matches—into memorable, wacky, inventive, crowd-drawing public art.
Fred Sandback
NEW YORK David Zwirner When the Victorian poet Robert Browning coined the phrase “less is more” in a poem about the painter Andrea del Sarto, he could not have known how apt it would be in regard to the string sculptures of Fred Sandback. A stylistic colleague of the Minimalist sculptors of the 1960s and ’70s, Sandback evolved a language that made the most out of acrylic yarn, a highly humble material.
Allison Schulnik
NEW YORK Ziehersmith Widely acclaimed in Los Angeles-oriented group shows in the U.S., Europe, Russia, and Israel, Allison Schulnik is a good example of a young artist coming out of the CalArts experimental animation program. Her third New York show, which combined sculpture, painting, and animation video, took on the atmosphere of a dark and threatening circus sideshow, the works all bound together by an utterly individual, somewhat funky West Coast sensibility.
Rachel Rotenberg
WASHINGTON, DC Hillyer Art Space One of the most compelling aspects of Rachel Rotenberg’s sculptures is their singular admixture of delicacy and robustness. The first of these qualities comes from the apparently effortless ways in which she turns, pulls, and molds her materials—typically cedar planks, often combined with tree limbs or vines—into endlessly suggestive forms, complete with subtle color accents.
Wilhelm Lehmbruck
NEW YORK Michael Werner Gallery The first major Wilhelm Lehmbruck exhibition in the U.S. in more than two decades has reconfirmed his importance as one of the most progressive sculptors of the early 20th century. In fact, it leaves one lamenting that there has only been one American museum retrospective to date, at the National Gallery of Art in 1972.
“you, your sun and shadow”
RICHMOND, VIRGINIA Anderson Gallery Almost as if curator Michael Jones McKean had assembled a collection of artifacts for private contemplation, “you, your sun and shadow” offered a meditation on the function of sculpture, implying that it provides opportunities to consider the relevance of subject/object relations in an everyday world.
Joseph and John Dumbacher
WASHINGTON, DC Curator’s Office The title of a recent show by fraternal twins Joseph and John Dumbacher—“elsewhere: a call to the open road or an antidote to whatever”—offers a decided yes to both options. The focused selection of five sculptures and 10 drawings signals a breakthrough in their risk-taking while affirming that their works are anything but random.
Kosyo Minchev
NEW YORK Stux Gallery Bulgarian-born Kosyo Minchev creates works that are incisive in their commentary, wit, material cognizance, and unpretentious formality. His sculptures reach out somewhere between aesthetics and politics, or, better put, they implant politics within aesthetics.
Speak, Materials: Dan Steinhilber’s Way with the Everyday
Do you remember the sound of your parents’ basement? The drone of the dehumidifier, the steady whir of the dryer, the hollow thump made by Uncle Kent’s college trunk? Dan Steinhilber does. Marlin Underground, his installation on the lower level of the Kreeger Museum in Washington, DC, (on view until December 29) consists of an ensemble
“Gestures: Intimate Friction”
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory It was no surprise that “Gestures: Intimate Friction,” guest-curated by Mary-Lou Arscott, a British architect living in Pittsburgh, included architects and designers in addition to visual artists. In her statement, Arscott explains, “Our physical reality bumps up against us and then disappears from view…The process of creating the installations in this exhibition will be collapsing, constructive, and collaborative.”
