The 12th Istanbul Biennial focused on artists from the Middle East and Latin America. According to “Untitled” co-curator Jens Hoffman, “We were looking for artworks that are formally innovative as well as politically outspoken and that relate to the general themes of the exhibition such as migration, violence, identity, and politics.”
Andrew Mowbray: Weird Science and Aesthetics
Andrew Mowbray makes objects that, in the spirit of his hero Marcel Duchamp, upend elitist notions about the artist, the art object, and its place in the traditional white-box gallery. His finely tooled works—frequently carved out of ivory polyurethane—are often used in video performances sited outside or staged within gallery walls.
Ranjani Shettar: Playing with Creation
Ranjani Shettar says that she turned from painting to sculpture because “I realized I had to move around the object, it had to occupy the same space that I did and there was no illusion in it.
Rita McBride: (Re) Negotiating the Public Realm
American artist Rita McBride has spent the past decade living and working in Germany. She can be characterized as a sculptor with a passion for probing materials previously unexplored in the arts or at the cutting edge of research.
Marc Swanson
HOUSTON Contemporary Arts Museum Houston Marc Swanson’s recent solo exhibition was named for Second Story, a now defunct gay bar in San Francisco that had closed before the artist even visited the city.
Aristotle Georgiades
CHICAGO Chicago Cultural Center Aristotle Georgiades’s recent exhibition “Repurposed” featured eight sculptures constructed from salvaged wooden and metal objects.
William Corwin
NEW YORK The Clocktower A chess game played by two American masters at The Clocktower in Lower Manhattan marked the culmination of a residency held by William Corwin, a New York sculptor who thinks long and hard about conceptual motifs.
Shuli Sadé: Thinking in Time
Shuli Sadé, an Israeli-born, New York-based artist, specializes in working across the interstices of art categories. Most often, her work has to do with photography and video, but her images also explore the boundaries of two-dimensional and three-dimensional form.
Allan Wexler: The Man Who Would Be Architecture
Two bird nests cradling speckled eggs sit in a glass vitrine in Allan Wexler’s living room. Propped beneath them on the floor is his drawing Positions of Plywood (2007), six softly rendered planes afloat on ochre paper.
