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
Brendan Jamison
London London Festival of Architecture Neo Bankside, designed by Rogers Stirk Harbour and Partners, is a new residential development adjacent to Tate Modern on the South Bank of London. As a contribution to the London Festival of Architecture (and a rather astute PR exercise), developers Native Land and Grosvenor commissioned Irish sculptor Brendan Jamison to
Action and Spatial Engagement: A Conversation with Frank Stella
Frank Stella was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center in 2011. For a full list of Lifetime Achievement Award recipients, click here. Frank Stella, who is honored this year with the International Sculpture Center’s 2011 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award, will always be best remembered for his radical Black Paintings (1958-60), which consist of
Magdalena Abakanowicz: Allegories of Time
Magdalena Abakanowicz’s recent sculpture reveals a type of allegorical theater. Her well-known Walking Figures project an ironic expressive content while retaining a formal rigor. Paradoxically, these massive sculptural figurations imply a quiet anonymity. Headless and armless, the inscrutably vital, masculine figures mostly stand upright, modeled in a strident pose.
Inside the Worlds of the Dead: A Conversation with Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski’s ideas often germinate over time and address notions involving time. In 2005, he used his own heartbeat in a pitch-black void for a Paris exhibition. Heartbeats also provided a soundtrack for his recent large-scale installations in Paris, New York, and Milan and are being collected worldwide for Les Archives du Coeur (The Heart Archive), on
Yoshitomo Nara: Making Space for Misfits
Yoshitomo Nara and Takashi Murakami began to get international recognition at almost the same time, both admired for their childhood/pop culture imagery. Nara had a bit of a head start, particularly in Europe, since he was living in Germany from 1988 to 2000.
Nothing is More or Less Alive: A Conversation with Eduardo Kac
Since the early 1980s, Eduardo Kac (pronounced “Katz”) has created challenging combinations of the biological, the technological, and the linguistic, raising important questions about the cultural impact and ethical implications of biotechnologies. An innovator and pioneer of forms, he began experimenting in the pre-Web ’80s with works that used telerobotics—systems of remote communication linking software,
