Los Angeles Hammer Museum “Made in L.A.,” the first biennial survey of Los Angeles-based artists, featured three artists making interesting sculpture—Liz Glynn, Caroline Thomas, and David Snyder. A sufficient amount of their work was on view to reveal their conceptual trajectories.
Francis Upritchard
NOTTINGHAM, U.K. Nottingham Contemporary When I entered Francis Upritchard’s recent exhibition, I was puzzled at first. Two spacious galleries were filled with eccentric, fantastical figures placed on plinths designed by Martino Gamper. In the first room, white, terra-cotta, brown, and gray creatures wearing medieval clothes looked as though they had been unearthed from the past.
David Middlebrook
SAN FRANCISCO The McLoughlin Gallery Wood, stone, and metal may have been supplanted by newer materials (e.g., chocolate, tofu, and frozen blood), but some artists enjoy both the technical and aesthetic challenges of traditional, “noble” materials. David Middlebrook, who emerged on the Bay Area gallery scene only relatively recently—with a 2010 retrospective at the Triton Museum in Santa Clara and now this solo show—has had a long career making public sculpture and teaching (at San Jose State University), so he’s well versed in both technique and theory.
Greg Payce
TORONTO Gardiner Museum The work of Greg Payce may be framed within and by the medium of ceramics, but unlike, say, the work of a ceramic sculptor like Peter Voulkos, Payce’s aesthetic has less to do with a focus on the merits of the medium itself and virtually everything to do with exploring the inversion of the figure-ground relationship.
Gary Webb
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum Slick, colorful, playful, and without a cohesive aesthetic, Gary Webb’s work has yet to settle on a recognizable style—he’s having too much fun. A carnival atmosphere pervaded his recent show, “Gary Webb: Mr. Jeans,” with nursery-school hues and shapes bending, arching, and trying to fly off in all directions.
Carlito Carvalhosa
NEW YORK Sonnabend Gallery Carlito Carvalhosa was born in São Paulo, studied at the University of São Paulo’s Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism, and lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. His unorthodox and visionary fabrications suggest an acute knowledge of architecture and spatial interaction, while his handling of light and space is concurrently an act of camouflage and disclosure.
Place as a Condition of Time: A Conversation with Winifred Lutz
Winifred Lutz’s work crosses the boundaries of seemingly divergent disciplines and encompasses many angles of thinking. In this interview, we knew that we could only touch on one aspect of her work, so we chose to look through the lens of the garden since we share a deep interest in the dynamic processes of the
Kevin Francis Gray
NEW YORK Haunch of Venison The pursuit of figurative sculpture today occurs not without a sense of déjà vu; like figurative painting, representational sculpture is hard put to break out of tradition to reach an exploratory, even experimental, sense of the medium. But Kevin Francis Gray’s recent work shows us that a questioning, innovative sensibility can still expand the range of figurative art.
David Henderson’s Soaring Space
David Henderson’s A History of Aviation-Part 2 circumvents the dominant movements of postwar art. The soaring white fiberglass and Dacron installation, which filled an entire gallery, is neither conceptual nor politically driven. It does not reference the gestural painting or sculpture of Abstract Expressionism.
Chiharu Shiota
NEW YORK Haunch of Venison Chiharu Shiota’s sculptures and installations use basic materials—glass windows, black thread, found objects such as a violin or a child’s dress—in highly innovative ways. Born in Japan, now based in Berlin, Shiota makes use of an international language of contemporary art, one which serves to poetically enclose information about objects whose history can be felt if not touched.
