A round-up of this year’s best outdoor sculpture exhibitions.
Bouke de Vries
PITTSBURGH The Frick Art Museum The Frick Art Museum, located on the Pittsburgh estate of the late-19th-century coke and steel magnate Henry Clay Frick, was founded in 1970 by his daughter Helen to house her collection of European fine and decorative arts. This rich setting provides a perfect context for War and Pieces (on view through September 5, 2021), an installation originally created by Dutch ceramics-conservator-turned-artist Bouke de Vries for the Holburne Museum in Bath, England.
Lucy Skaer
LONDON London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE For “Forest on Fire,” the sixth iteration of the project, Lucy Skaer, whose practice draws on history, art history, archaeology, and nature, drew inspiration from the Tauroctony (bull slaying) at the heart of the Mithraic cult and from walks through the surrounding district of London, redolent, as she explained in an online talk, with the history of the animal trade.
La Cuestión de la Línea: Una Conversación con Beto De Volder
Artista argentino residente en New York, Beto De Volder estudió en la escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano en Buenos Aires y comenzó a exponer su obra en 1991.
Laura Amussen
MONKTON, MARYLAND Ladew Topiary Gardens As the world screeched to a standstill last year, Laura Amussen continued working on the large-scale installations for her 2020 sculptor-in-residence exhibition at the Ladew Topiary Gardens. “Flourish” acted as a living testament to Amussen’s practice, which explores natural phenomena, human relationships, and climate change.
The Persistence of Inconsistency: A Conversation with Joan Tanner
For the past five decades, Joan Tanner has pursued a rigorous and sustained investigation into spatial relationships via methods of concealment, combined with ideas of instability, impermanence, contradiction, and disruption.
Object Lessons: Jackson Martin
“Making Amends” started with a broken laundry basket—a mass-produced, disposable product that, once broken, is designed to be thrown away and replaced, not fixed. The handle cracked, and my first thought was to buy another one.
Brian Sanchez and Neon Saltwater
SEATTLE Museum of Museums Energy Drink, an extensive, immersive installation by the artist team of Brian Sanchez and Neon Saltwater (on view through August 29, 2021), presents a number of possible interpretations: a gay dystopian environment for a “happy” couple; a hallucinatory fun house revolving around domestic symbols; a series of discrete activity areas for upscale urbanites who require access to gyms, spas, art galleries, sculpture studios, bars, and lounges.
Out of the Ordinary: A Conversation with Sook Jin Jo
Sook Jin Jo’s unusual and moving aesthetic depends on materials collected from the street and put to use in sculptures, installations, and public art projects focused on social responsibility and collaboration.
Gedi Sibony
NEW YORK Greene Naftali “The Terrace Theater,” Gedi Sibony’s recent exhibition, offered a performance centering on natural light as it restaged objects and their shadows in relation to each other, the spaces between them, and viewers. As with any show, some viewers left minutes later, unaware that they had flubbed their walk-on role. At least a few lingered and began to see that Sibony’s exhibition asked new questions as well as old ones.
