CAGUAS, PUERTO RICO AREA There are times when an artist unexpectedly breaks away from a trend. Puerto Rico, an island with many creative minds but few institutional frameworks to support them, has recently been the site for works that either confront its ambiguous political situation rather directly and simplistically or limit themselves to representations of tropical clichés.
Jeff Koons
BASEL Beyeler Foundation Visitors strolling through Jeff Koons’s recent exhibition at the Beyeler Foundation looked happy and comfortable. It didn’t matter our age or how serious, critically involved, or skeptical we were when we entered; once inside, we looked at Koons’s works without prejudice, contagious smiles lighting up our faces, our eyes shining with childish joy.
Annica Cuppetelli and Cristobal Mendoza
PHILADELPHIA Grizzly Grizzly As part of the city-wide festival Fiber Philadelphia 2012, two Detroit-based artists collaborated on an installation synthesizing reactive video projection and physical structure. Annica Cuppetelli, a fiber artist concerned with issues of space, interaction, and materiality, worked with media artist and programmer Cristobal Mendoza, whose interests lie in the intersection of technology and the personal.
Not Vital’s Recent Sculpture: Forms That Speak Through One Another
Like much post-conceptual art, a new group of works by the nomadic, Italian-born Not Vital rejects explicit interpretation in favor of an open approach to meaning. These sculptures, which recall landscapes, animals, and body fragments, exist in a half-familiar, but distorted world beyond the everyday.
Erick Swenson
DALLAS Nasher Sculpture Center The work of Erick Swenson has a visceral appeal. In Scuttle, for instance, a meticulously detailed conch holds the body of a sea snail halted in the midst of its wriggling. At once tongue-like and pudendal, the elongated end of the snail’s body emerges erect, while its broader half wraps around the hard outer shell, squeezing it in a stranglehold.
Richard Artschwager
NEW YORK Leo Castelli Gallery Richard Artschwager’s work is not exactly Pop in the sense of Oldenburg’s sculpture or, for that matter, works by George Segal, Marjorie Strider, or Robert Indiana. The question has arisen more than once as to whether Artschwager belongs in the category of Pop at all. But where else?
Steve Lambert
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum It looks like a chunk of retro advertising that fell off a building in Times Square: white light bulbs spelling out, in gigantic letters, CAPITALISM. Below, script adds, “Works for me!” On either side comes the kicker: “True” or “False.”
Donald Moffett
NEW YORK Marianne Boesky Gallery Donald Moffett continually finds new ways to make paintings. A decade ago, he projected moving figurative images onto monochromatic supports of oil and enamel on linen.
Arnaldo Pomodoro: Voyage Through the Labyrinth
Arnaldo Pomodoro’s most significant “sign” is personal but recognizable, though many people—including perhaps the artist himself when he began his exploration more than 50 years ago—are unable to explain its meaning. The image of the labyrinth surfaces in Pomodoro’s earliest works, including Moon, Sun, Tower (1955), Sun Nutriment (1955), Horizon (1956), and Mark (1957).
Uglycute
STOCKHOLM Marabouparken It may seem unorthodox and even premature to stage a retrospective of a career that has only lasted for 13 years, but then Uglycute, the Swedish art and design collective, is neither conventional nor concerned with timeliness. Furthermore, the four members of Uglycute—Markus Degerman, Andreas Nobel, Jonas Nobel, and Fredrik Stenberg—have created such a vast number of furniture pieces, exhibition designs, and environments that their retrospective was both rich and rewarding.
