NEW YORK Kasmin Allen’s works radiate a rare touch-me quality that retains the intimacy of their making—hand-sculpted in wax or clay, worked and reworked until the forms gradually emerge. The objects have correspondences, particularly to the natural world, but cannot be classified; they are both figurative and abstract, organic and geometrical.
Igshaan Adams
LONDON Hayward Gallery In the hands of Igshaan Adams, a sculpture is in endless evolution. As the South African artist explained during the opening of his current exhibition (on view through July 25, 2021), “My sculptures are a never-ending work. I add materials in different moments, and leave them aside in the studio for years at times because with my sculptures there is no intention or agenda. It is about trying out new ideas.”
Commissions
Five new public art projects to visit this year.
Lucia Hierro: Con una Taza de Chocolate
One of my mother’s favorite memories from her childhood in Puerto Rico was finding and attending funerals. She and my Titi Maritza would run around searching for fatalities, checking in on old people, scouring the news.
Working Together: A Conversation with Mark Cooper
Mark Cooper’s sculptures seem particularly suited to the uncertain nature of our times. Like the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Cooper “liv[es] the question” through his work, both personal and collaborative, creating visual forms that bear traces of a rich, compelling, infinitely productive, and changeable process.
Roberley Bell
BOSTON Boston Sculptors Launchpad Gallery In “Between Uncertainty,” Roberley Bell’s current exhibition (on view through July 2, 2021), floral wallpaper covers a corner of the gallery. Still Life with Table plays off the floral theme perfectly. Fanciful and provocative, the white wood and pink foam sculpture rises like a flowering bonsai with its twisted root base and puff top.
Material Instincts: A Conversation with Daniel Giordano
Daniel Giordano works on the third floor of his family’s former coat factory in Newburgh, New York (across the Hudson River from Beacon), where he makes outlandishly beautiful sculpture from the most unlikely of materials. Very much aware of Modernism but not beholden to it, Giordano represents a new kind of creative thinking.
De Hombres y Niños: Una Conversación con Manuel De Francesco
El escultor cordobés Manuel De Francesco, docente en la Universidad Nacional de Artes (UNA) en la ciudad de Buenos Aires donde vive desde hace años, desarrolla un tipo de obra que atrapa la mirada del espectador apelando indefectiblemente a la ternura y la empatía emocional.
Artists at the Heart of the City: Grangegorman Public Art (Part 2)
“the lives we live” Grangegorman Public Art aims to engage artists and communities with “ambition, innovation, and relevance.” Here, in Part Two, three commissioned artists—Trish McAdam, Justine McDonnell, and Clodagh McEmoe—reflect on their projects.
Artists at the Heart of the City: Grangegorman Public Art (Part 1)
Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, Grangegorman, which had been an agricultural hamlet of Dublin, was radically transformed into a working class urban center dominated by penal and welfare institutions, including workhouses for adults and children, a foundling hospital, a surgical hospital, a penitentiary, and a mental hospital serving much of the region.
