NEW YORK Whitney Museum of American Art The 2012 Whitney Biennial was a modest affair. Whether by choice or necessity, this economy of means resulted in a refreshingly accessible exhibition with a personal, DIY aesthetic, one that acknowledged the downsized ambitions and reduced funding of the Great Recession while remaining intent on taking the pulse of the contemporary art world.
Cathy Wilkes
PITTSBURGH Carnegie Museum of Art Cathy Wilkes, who studied at the Glasgow School of Art in the mid-’80s and then helped to fuel the city’s art scene in the 1990s, has become known for enigmatic, sometimes poignant installations fabricated from sculpted and appropriated found objects. In 2008, the Belfast-born artist was nominated for the Turner Prize, and in the summer of 2011, she had her first solo museum exhibition in the U.S. at the Aspen Art Museum.
David Hare
SAN FRANCISCO Weinstein Gallery The Weinstein Gallery is to be commended for bringing attention to American artists who were close to the Surrealist movement, including Enrique Donati, Gordon Onslow Ford, Jimmy Ernst, and David Hare. In today’s media-drenched culture, our recall of artists is as short-lived as our attention to political events, and Hare has been out of view for too long.
“Roundabout: Face to Face”
TEL AVIV Tel Aviv Museum of Art With artists from Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Britain, and Israel, “Roundabout: Face to Face” could have been an unfocused presentation. But that was not the case. Portraits and figural scenes created a sense of unity, drawing together this exhibition of 60 works (with sculpture predominating) from the 200-piece contemporary art collection of David Teplitzky.
Futility and Enchantment: A Conversation with Sudarshan Shetty
“The setting of the installation plays out the falseness and futility in the objects, the artificial. Our engagement with the world of objects is very connected to our own mortality. In our making and gathering of objects, there is a sense of futility.
Eve Ingalls
NEW YORKSOHO20 Chelsea Eve Ingalls works out of a former chicken coop in the Sourland Mountains of New Jersey, with a vista that could be mistaken for Vermont, but thoughts of oil spills, hurricanes, tsunamis, and other forms of environmental destruction are never far from her mind. Human manipulation may be destroying the earth, but she finds beauty in bringing it to the forefront of our attention.
Jitish Kallat
NEW DELHI Nature Morte Gallery Jitish Kallat draws on the energy of Mumbai to narrate the city’s story while creating a thought-provoking oasis where one can ponder various aspects of urban life. The title of his recent show, “Chlorophyll Park,” pays homage to the green pigment found in plants.
Edgardo Madanes: Roads Created
Buenos Aires-based Edgardo Madanes studied at the National School of Fine Arts Prilidiano Pueyrredon, taking such well-known artists as Nora Correa and Norberto Gomez as his mentors. Correa’s soft volumes, with their contrast between textile and sculpture, particularly captured Madanes’s attention, as did Gomez’s perfect balance between concept and passion.
Spencer Finch
PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design In homage to Monet, Spencer Finch titled his recent exhibition “Painting Air.” A quotation from the Impressionist painter, the phrase also riffs on the familiar description of Impressionism as “painting light,” though “sculpting” air might have been more accurate in Finch’s case.
Real and Imagined Movement: Robert Mangold
Denver sculptor Robert Mangold considers himself to be a “realist,” but his definition of the term is fairly idiosyncratic considering his abstract and non-objective works. For Mangold, who avoids even a whiff of representational imagery in his pieces, being a “realist” means that he’s interested in physical reality—in real gravity, in real movement, and in
