A pioneer of multimedia installation art in the 1980s, Susan Hiller went on to create a complex body of work that subverts our understanding of reality, offering an intellectual investigation into the darkest recesses of the human imagination.
From the Dirt: Corin Hewitt
Since 2007 Corin Hewitt has produced a series of evolving works that blend sculpture, photography, and performance. The most recent of these appeared at the Laurel Gitlin Gallery in New York last year, and a new iteration is scheduled to open at the Cleveland Museum of Contemporary Art in January 2013.
Michael Combs
NEW YORK Salomon Contemporary “Be All You Can’t Be,” Michael Combs’s first solo exhibition in New York, featured a white elephant in the middle of the room. Standing atop a delicate, hand-carved pillow, the creature (cast from a rubber toy, then enhanced to resemble a charging bull), is small in size but symbolically huge.
Between Fun and Desperation: Erwin Wurm
Since the 1980s, Austrian artist Erwin Wurm has worked to expand traditional notions of sculpture. Through his “one-minute sculptures,” which document conceptual performances in films and photographs, he invites viewers to realize that actions are more important than objects.
Andre Woodward: A Living Thing Shouldn’t Be There
Andre Woodward finds strange beauty in unexpected places. A beaten-up piece of asphalt raised on wheels and sprouting a small, frail tree becomes a grim urban landscape, mutated for speed. Blocks of concrete ordered in symmetrical grids or dispersed in random configurations miraculously burst with life, pierced by small trees that inject the irrepressible vitality
Delivering to the Moment: Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther
Manon Awst and Benjamin Walther create collaborative sculptures, performances, and paintings that combine ephemeral materials such as ice, grapes, and gelatin with plaster, metal, gold, and other materials. The husband-and-wife team take inspiration from their individual backgrounds in theater and architecture.
Brian Wall
SAN FRANCISCO Hackett | Mill Gallery The tradition of Constructivism is still with us and remains especially strong in the San Francisco Bay Area with two outstanding sculptors—Brian Wall and Fletcher Benton. Wall, whose early work was recently shown in Hackett | Mill Gallery’s “Brian Wall: Spatial Planes 1957– 1966,” was born in London in 1931 and moved to St. Ives in 1954, where he became an assistant to Barbara Hepworth the following year.
John Grade
ATLANTA Emory University John Grade’s Piedmont Divide installations at Emory University inhabited two very different areas of the campus. A constantly moving curtain of hundreds of individual parts was suspended over the Quadrangle, a grassy, tree-filled space briskly inhabited by students, faculty, dog walkers, and pecan gatherers.
Dianna Frid
CHICAGO devening projects + editions Five hundred years ago, Albrecht Dürer created a vivid woodcut of a rhinoceros not from first-hand observation but from hearsay. Now that we’ve closed the gap between the exotic and the observable, one can use Dürer’s method to describe the world retroactively.
