El escultor cordobés Manuel De Francesco, docente en la Universidad Nacional de Artes (UNA) en la ciudad de Buenos Aires donde vive desde hace años, desarrolla un tipo de obra que atrapa la mirada del espectador apelando indefectiblemente a la ternura y la empatía emocional.
Artists at the Heart of the City: Grangegorman Public Art (Part 2)
“the lives we live” Grangegorman Public Art aims to engage artists and communities with “ambition, innovation, and relevance.” Here, in Part Two, three commissioned artists—Trish McAdam, Justine McDonnell, and Clodagh McEmoe—reflect on their projects.
Artists at the Heart of the City: Grangegorman Public Art (Part 1)
Over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, Grangegorman, which had been an agricultural hamlet of Dublin, was radically transformed into a working class urban center dominated by penal and welfare institutions, including workhouses for adults and children, a foundling hospital, a surgical hospital, a penitentiary, and a mental hospital serving much of the region.
Shinique Smith and the Politics of Fabric
Shinique Smith has often related how reading a 2002 article in The New York Times Magazine prompted a new sculptural language in her work. “How Susie Bayer’s T-Shirt Ended Up on Yusuf Mama’s Back” traces the journey of a used T-shirt from the Upper East Side of Manhattan to Jinja, Uganda—part of a global trek of donated clothing from rich to poor countries.
Oren Pinhassi
LONDON Edel Assanti and St Cyprian’s Clarence Gate The anthropomorphic sculptures of Israel-born, New York-based Oren Pinhassi hold up a strange, disconcerting mirror to humanity. Though vaguely like us in appearance, their forms call to mind structures built for specific functions. If a voting booth or a urinal, for instance, were to mate with a human, this is what their offspring might look like.
Coral Lambert
MINNEAPOLIS NE Sculpture Gallery|Factory Equal parts grit and fantasy, “Alternate Worlds” (on view through June 12, 2021) is Coral Lambert’s response to life in the time of a pandemic. The show consists of recent cast iron and bronze sculptures, photographs, prints, and a video projection that collectively function in the seemingly liminal space between “twilight and dreams.”
Rafael Domenech
BEIJING Hua International Cuban-American artist Rafael Domenech contends that exhibition-making is an expanded form of publishing, an active site of production. His current exhibition, “Imperfect Fragments of an Uncertain Whole” (on view through June 18, 2021), presents a multipart installation consisting of a table, handmade artist books, mobile light sculptures, and ceiling tiles, all made between 2018 and 2021, as well as a large outdoor sculpture in a nearby public square.
Between Playful and Disturbing: A Conversation with Permindar Kaur
Approaching the familiar as though it were a fairy tale, Permindar Kaur uses the uncanny as camouflage in order to re-explain ordinary things. In “Home,” her current exhibition at Howick Place in central London, she continues her exploration of “private” and “public” by uprooting basic domestic objects and reintroducing them as freakishly distorted furnishings that enjoy the safety of the exhibition space while wanting to be free of it.
Spectral Memory: A Conversation with Liana Strasberg
What to remember and how to remember: these are the key concerns in Liana Strasberg’s work, which unearths and reworks images and symbols from the past in order to create what the Argentinian artist calls a “new memory file.”
Fragments of Interest: A Conversation with Marion Verboom
Complexly layered in thought and process, Marion Verboom’s works inhale cultural histories in order to exhale new-era imagery. By turns minimal, architectural, organic, and ornamental, her forms shape contemporary time into a fresh visual alphabet and run it A to Z through mythic narratives—from Aztec gods to the progeny of Zeus.
