Pablo Butteri feels a visceral link with nature. His works are organic and full of movement, with abstract beings emerging from labyrinths and knots. Salt, coal, glass, and silicone create enigmatic and enchanting, quasi-monochrome micro-worlds that invite viewers to follow unclear passages through dense spaces amid smoke and audiovisual projections.
Paul S. Briggs
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS Lucy Lacoste Gallery At a time when irony is a mainstream aesthetic force and the art object is frequently made coherent via the glitter of popular culture, work such as Briggs’s is rare and strangely daring. Abstraction becomes a visual manifestation of poetry, bearing literary notions of metaphor and symbolism.
Pia Camil
LOS ANGELES Blum & Poe Pia Camil’s work has consistently engaged ideas of power, consumerism, and collectivity, using the mass-market waste of Mexico City’s urban landscape to create theoretically complex objects and participatory installations. Her new body of work, produced after she relocated from the city to the rural countryside during the pandemic, takes these themes in a different direction.
Out of the Woods: A Conversation with Shigeo Toya
Japanese sculptor Shigeo Toya approaches nature as both a source of material and a site of hope. Very much a philosopher, he recognizes the intellectual character of the sculptural process while maintaining that the separation of art—and human life—from nature is mistaken.
Sarah Sze
MOUNTAINVILLE, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Sarah Sze’s Fallen Sky—Storm King’s first permanent commissioned outdoor sculpture since Maya Lin installed Storm King Wavefield in 2008—resembles a silhouetted planet earth, as if photographed from space. Composed of 130 polished steel fragments nestled into native grasses, it occupies the site where a large tree once stood.
Specific Ideas: A Conversation with Rebecca Ackroyd
Working across sculpture, drawing, and painting, Ackroyd creates installations that bring together the body, architecture, and sexuality in nightmarish and uncanny ways, excavating memory and history to confront the viewer with new notions of femininity and power.
Jun Kaneko: Between the Mark and Space
Recipient of the 2021 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award “Whether I’m making a large or small object, I hope it will make sense to have that particular scale and form together, and that it will give off enough visual energy to shake the air around it.”
Video: Rocket by Hubert Phipps
On the Boca Raton Innovation Campus (BRiC) in South Florida, artist Hubert Phipps has installed Rocket, a 30-foot-tall retrofuturistic stainless steel sculpture weighing almost 10 tons.
Made Worlds: A Conversation with Olivia Bax
London-based Olivia Bax makes brightly colored sculptures whose tactile, handmade aesthetic derives from the pulp and papier-mâché that she uses to cover steel, chicken wire, and foam armatures.
Moving Between States: A Conversation with John Rainey
John Rainey is a young Northern Irish artist whose work I first saw in 2016, when I marked him down as “one to watch.” Unlike many Irish artists, he was largely trained in England, at Manchester Metropolitan University and at the Royal College of Art in London.
