Santa Monica, California Patrick Painter Inc. Won Ju Lim’s sweeping installation Baroque Pet Shop celebrates convergences in cinematically tactile and weirdly complete ways. It combines relics of Baroque architecture with the urban trappings of Los Angeles’s Highland Park neighborhood, constructing an idiosyncratic environment in which embellished steeples, industrial scaffolding, and gaudy playthings make the ordinary
Claire Fontaine
Miami MOCA North Miami The French collective Claire Fontaine, a man-and-woman team named after the utilitarian Clairefontaine notebooks, play with language throughout their work, “Economies,” the title of their first American exhibition, immediately calls to mind the economies that one must make in tough financial times; the ready-made sculptures also pose more theoretical, global economic
Michael Murrell
Madison, Georgia Madison-Morgan Cultural Center Michael Murrell’s recent exhibition, “From the Forest to the Shore,” was a tour de force of color, mixed media, and sheer conceptual boldness. Many of these oversized pieces seemed to expand upward and outward in a robust embrace of the natural world that inspired them.
Chris Garofalo
Chicago Rhona Hoffman Gallery Though not a realist per se, Chicago-based sculptor Chris Garofalo takes inspiration from various life forms. She works primarily in porcelain or clay to create objects that visually fuse and elaborate on elements found in both fauna and flora, terrestrial and marine life.
“Open Book”
Ypsilanti, Michigan Eastern Michigan University Sculptures celebrating properties inherent to books, but not artists’ books, featured in “Open Book: An International Survey of Experimental Books,” an eye-opening group exhibition of inventive, frequently challenging work by 18 invited artists…see the full review in May’s magazine.
Linda Stein
New York Flomenhaft Gallery Linda Stein’s recent exhibition of new work focused on the combination of popular culture, myth, and body politics. By eliciting the contradictions that continue to exist between cultural ideals and lived reality, Stein’s work attempts to bridge the gap by creating shells of body armor that speak to the sociopolitical situation
Williamsburg Waterfront Sculpture Exhibition
Williamsburg, New York East River State Park The Brooklyn-based nonprofit Urban Art Projects recently held its inaugural sculpture exhibition, punctuating East River State Park with the work of seven diverse artists. Each piece became a temporal relic that enhanced its surroundings as sculptors envisioned a new aesthetic order for old New York and beyond…see the
Jaume Plensa
Dallas Nasher Sculpture Center The figure functions in two primary ways in Jaume Plensa’s work: literally and performatively. With respect to the former, his male figures are the obvious bearers of old-fashioned humanist queries concerning man’s position in the universe and the meaning of his life.
Steven B. Nguyen
Seattle Suyama Space Brooklyn artist Stephen B. Nguyen, who emerged on the art scene around 2005, began his career as a color field painter, but, as he said in an artist statement, he wanted to focus more on a pure visual experience.
Shayne Dark and Dennis Gill
Oshawa, Canada The Robert McLaughlin Gallery The sculptures featured in “Fear and Faith,” Shayne Dark and Dennis Gill’s recent exhibition, seemed to be the unsettling, if inadvertent, offspring of Louise Bourgeois’s Maman (1999/2003), a 30-foot-tall bronze spider bearing a sac of 26 pure white marble eggs under her belly (there is a version in front
