WEST VANCOUVER, CANADA West Vancouver Museum Sonny Assu, an Aboriginal artist from Vancouver, is gaining attention for his reversal of early 20th-century art history. More than 100 years after Western artists “advanced” art by looking “back” at Aboriginal culture, Assu is turning to Western art to modernize Aboriginal traditions of the Northwest Coast.
Éamonn O’Doherty
DUBLIN Kevin Kavanagh Gallery About two weeks before this exhibition opened, I was sitting at the bedside of Éamonn O’Doherty in a Dublin cancer hospital. He had been given two months to live (though, in the end, he only got three weeks), but he faced dying in the same manner that he broached his sculpture: with impish and iconoclastic good humor, a lunchtime bottle of red wine, and a request that I do a “proper” interview with him, “proper” meaning a no-holds-barred, utterly indiscreet assassination of all those he considered morally contemptible in the world of art.
2011 Asian Art Biennial “Mediation/Meditation”
TAICHUNG, TAIWAN National Museum of Fine Arts “Mediation/Meditation,” the third edition of the Asian Art Biennial, was curated by Iris Shu-ping Huang of the National Museum. The dual theme made an additional allusion to Japanese economist Kenichi Ohmae’s theory of the M-shaped society, which describes the global decline of the middle class and its replacement with equal peaks of rich and poor.
Animal Unrest
Adopting a disturbingly human posture, a hare constricts into a hieroglyph of anguish. Choking and gasping, a jackal succumbs to a muscle-locking spasm. Grimacing in a ghastly blend of snarl and plaintive cry, a disheveled possum peevishly limps away.
Eylem Aladogan: Iron Triggers That Could Be Released
Eylem Aladogan’s large-scale sculptural work recently emerged from the Dutch art world like a moth bursting from its cocoon, finding international exposure at the 12th Istanbul Biennial. Though her smaller work has appeared in Paris, Basel, Munich, Los Angeles, and New York, her major pieces had been exhibited only in Netherlands-based art museums such as
Rima Schulkind
WASHINGTON, DC Touchstone Gallery This exhibition of eight complicated assemblages made from a variety of recycled objects marked a departure from Rima Schulkind’s earlier work. Collectively addressing the fertility of human invention and the wastefulness produced by obsolete technology, each “totem” displays a particular category of technological devices, including those used to manipulate numbers, reproduce images, communicate sound, write words, measure time, and record history.
Klara Kristalova: Craft and the Subconscious
A new voice in sculpture, Klara Kristalova shapes subconscious and dark states of being. Her unique personalizations immerse the viewer in human and animal states of mind. She was a baby when her parents fled Czechoslovakia in 1968 and moved to Sweden.
Vanessa German
NEW YORK Pavel Zoubok Gallery Vanessa German paints over old, white-skinned dolls with black pigment and tar, delving into identity, race, and racism (as in the use of the term “tar baby” to refer to someone who is very dark skinned).
Maurizio Cattelan
NEW YORK Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Some years ago, I argued in favor of making a critical distinction between works of art that are significant and those that are merely symptomatic of the times.
Do Ho Suh
NEW YORK Lehmann Maupin Do Ho Suh, easily one of the most interesting sculptors working in America today, presented a lot of things in this show—models of homes (one like a dollhouse and the other done in a pale-green resin), as well as such mundane objects as a sink, a circuit-breaker, and a doorknob (the last three made of translucent cloth).
