Jon Kessler emerged in the early 1980s with mixed-media wall constructions that incorporated readymades and machine-driven movement, works that juxtaposed discrete zones of figuration against an armature and islands of abstraction, balanced biomorphic and geometric forms, and embraced color, pattern, and decoration.
Arthur Simms
LOS ANGELES Karma Improvisatory and yet obsessive, Arthur Simms’s sculptures manifest the intensity of his process. His work is provocative, compelling, hard to look at—and at least part of its power comes from his drive to make such fierce, volatile, and demanding objects.
Mike Nelson
LONDON Hayward Gallery An extraordinary feat of planning and labor, the exhibition, which covers 25 years, encompasses around 20 interconnected rooms and corridors, involving 40 tons of sand, 5,000 feet of reclaimed timber, and the skills of more than 30 builders and technicians.
Object Lessons: Randi Renate
We swam below the surface of a gentle rolling current off the island of Grand Bahama, carrying bright cartons of small coral fragments, fingers of elkhorn coral, and cookie-sized disks of even smaller coral shards that had begun to fuse together.
Shari Mendelson
HUDSON, NEW YORK Pamela Salisbury Gallery Ancient, quasi-mystical artifacts—those once lively objects from the distant past that have survived—come to us as unknowable, fundamentally opaque, and foreign, displayed in the highly charged confines of museums.
In And Of the World: A Conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s work inhabits a psychological terrain of pathos, tenderness, and unease. Her sculptures express vulnerability and fragility, the suffering body—human and animal—as well as the overwhelming power of nature (and time).
Emotional Structures: A Conversation with Liva Isakson Lundin
Liva Isakson Lundin, who was educated in Stockholm and currently works in New York City, creates environments that respond to their sites with great sensitivity. Her installations and sculptures are inspired by Modernism’s century-long legacy, but their formalism is invested with a searching energy and emotional resonance that are thoroughly contemporary.
Will Cruickshank
EXETER, ENGLAND Exeter Phoenix For Cruickshank, the particular qualities of spun yarn—its durability, tenacity, flexibility, softness, resilience, and color-bearing—become the prime concern, manipulated by the idiosyncrasies of makeshift technology.
Mundane Acts: A Conversation with Oscar Tuazon
Oscar Tuazon works in and out of and between sculpture, architecture, and the meditative spirit. His practice also expands toward activism related to land and water access and infrastructure. Often using architectural techniques and materials, he produces quasi-functional objects, parts or representations of spaces, and constructions that are open to use and appropriation.
Maria Bartuszová
LONDON Tate Modern This exhibition marks the first major show in the U.K. of works by the extraordinary Slovak artist Maria Bartuszová (1936–96), whose abstract plaster sculptures are replete with organic forms both fragile and solid, sometimes tortured and always corporeal.
