Who we are is determined to a considerable extent by what we are. The what includes our origins in time and place, gender, race, social status, sexual orientation, education, and political and religious convictions. Once we have this information, we believe that we know enough about a person to be able to classify and judge
Carlos Runcie Tanaka: The Pleasures of Simultaneity
Initial approaches to the sculptures and installations of Carlos Runcie Tanaka, a Peruvian artist of British and Japanese descent who lives and works in Lima, disclose an aesthetic mission based on intuiting ideas through a complex theater of abstract and referential images in which light and color play a significant role.
Making Worlds: Chicago Sound as Sculpture
Sculpture—situated within the sensibilities of space, embodiment, and the physical world—offers a richly speculative arena for experimentation with materials and technology. The continuing expansion of practices reminds us that sculpture no longer resides in a world of “things”: contemporary physics now reformulates “solid” matter as process and flow, foundational concepts for art are now redefined
John McCracken: Materialist, Transcendentalist, Minimalist
Minimal art and Minimalism imply two different strains within the scope of contemporary American art. For the most part, Minimal art began in New York and was named there (Richard Wolheim, 1965) before it was formalized on the West Coast.
When Place Becomes Sculpture: A Conversation with Mauro Staccioli
Mauro Staccioli first received critical attention at the beginning of the 1970s with a group of “signs,” as he calls his works. For him, the location of these signs is of utmost importance—place becomes sculpture (in Francesca Pola’s phrase).
Yuriko Yamaguchi: Fragile Connections
Yuriko Yamaguchi’s studio feels like a tree house. A highly regarded conceptual sculptor whose work hangs in numerous galleries and museums, Yamaguchi works in a space above the garage of her suburban Virginia house. She occasionally takes tea breaks on a small deck attached to the high-ceilinged room, gazing out at the thick, trail-threaded woods.
Berlinde de Bruyckere
Zürich Hauser & Wirth Berlinde de Bruyckere’s sculptures are imbued with the sublime—they combine awe and anxiety to approach something akin to spiritual uplift. The Belgian sculptor (who has become an international sensation in recent years) works in Ghent, Belgium, in a former Catholic boys’ school transformed into a studio.
Won Ju Lim
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.
