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).
Rene Rietmeyer: Time, Space, and Existence
Rene Rietmeyer creates abstract, three-dimensional wall objects that he calls “Boxes.” These works address his personal existence within time and space. Through formal means such as shape, color, texture, composition, and choice of materials, Rietmeyer visualizes his experiences of a certain region or a specific person encountered at a particular place and time.
Ginny Ruffner’s Seattle Garden
Ginny Ruffner’s role in the early years of the Pilchuck Glass School and inspirational recovery from a severe car accident in 1991 have kept her close to the hearts of many cultural observers in the Pacific Northwest, so, of course, the installation of her new, 27-foot-tall, almost 10,000-pound, mechanized sculpture in downtown Seattle has generated
Gregory Barsamian and the Flying Dream
Gregory Barsamian’s work exists in a profound confrontation with reality. Theatrical in the sense that it takes place in a darkened space before a passively engaged audience, his sculpture relies almost completely on the viewer, because what the viewer sees, seemingly fully present and tangible, is, in fact, not there.
Jonathan Prince
NEW YORK The Sculpture Garden at 590 Madison Avenue Felicitously staged among stately bamboo in the soaring atrium of New York City’s IBM building, Jonathan Prince’s four monumental steel sculptures brought to mind one of Plato’s favorite sayings: God is always doing geometry. Classic forms bearing historical and symbolic associations, Prince’s obelisk, flattened sphere, cube, and torus all display rich sienna patinas that accentuate their contours.
Michael Arata
LOS ANGELES Beacon Arts Building To say that Michael Arata is prolific is almost laughable. “Arataland!,” a retrospective of this Los Angeles-based artist, recently filled more than 20 rooms in the three-story Beacon Arts Building.
“Boundaries Obscured”
NEW YORK Haunch of Venison These days, the synergy between art and life occurs so quickly that it is hard for artists to keep up. Opening a few months after the Arab Spring and only a week after Occupy Wall Street decamped from Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan, “Boundaries Obscured” took on the hot topics of globalization, technology, and the blurred geographic boundaries responsible for outsourcing, Facebook revolutions, and collaborative protests over economic inequality.
