At first glance, Susan Collis’s “Without you the world goes on,” at the Des Moines Art Center last year, looked more like an after-hours jobsite or an installation in progress than a finished art exhibition. Bundles of wood, a pair of worker’s overalls, a table, ladder, and chair, brooms, some drop cloths, a storage bag, even a tattered blue plastic tarp lay scattered about or were haphazardly pinned to the walls.
Woody De Othello
NEW YORK Karma De Othello employs a popularizing faux naiveté, deliberately handling sophisticated materials in a crude way, as if an expert had assisted a child. Here, the presentation mocked despair, weighed urban desolation with historical oppression, and ended on an uplifting note that was neither condemning nor angry.
Mrinalini Mukherjee
NEW YORK The Met Breuer The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) is astounding, melding craft, high concept, and humor with the consequences of pressing Modernism through the sieve of traditional Indian cultural forms. Her sculptures are overtly sensual, referencing aspects of human sexuality and the fecundity of nature. Both simple and complex, they play at the boundaries between abstract and figurative, artificial and natural.
“Between Bodies”
SEATTLE Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington The eight artists featured in “Between Bodies” take us from the air down to minerals deep in the earth, to untamed rivers, to smoking forests, and finally to the sounds and micro-organisms of the deep sea. They explore metaphors of sexual transformation, intraspecies and trans-species communication, future avatars and present voices.
Zoë Sheehan Saldaña and Glenn Adamson in Conversation
“There Must Be Some Way Out of Here,” on view at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum through May 25, 2020, is artist Zoë Sheehan Saldaña’s most comprehensive exhibition to date. It consists of some 50 handmade objects—“artistic camouflage,” as the museum puts it—that appear to be ordinary items one might find in any home.
Ave Fénix: Una Conversación con Silvia Battistuzzi
Silvia Battistuzzi está formada en el campo del psicoanálisis, dibujo y pintura en los talleres de la Asociación Estímulo de Bellas Artes en Buenos Aires, así como tomando seminarios internacionales y clínicas de arte con curadores y críticos.
Siah Armajani
NEW YORK The Met Breuer The exhibition included a striking display of models from the “Dictionary for Building” series (1974–75). Occupying much of a large gallery, a lengthy counter displayed 150 small-scale maquettes depicting the architectural elements of a house combined into different permutations, complete with odd furniture.
9th Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art
BRISBANE, AUSTRALIA Queensland Art Gallery of Modern Art APT9 delighted with its pageantry, featuring more than 400 pieces across mediums. Attendees of all ages and cultural backgrounds appeared appreciative, perhaps unaware of criticisms of the neo-colonial gaze presiding over such shows, as omnipresent curators crown the next “art world darlings.”
A Conversation with Vibha Galhotra
“Beyond the Blue,” Vibha Galhotra’s current solo exhibition at Jack Shainman Gallery in New York, imagines a narrative of interplanetary migration to Mars in the wake of the (human-made) destruction of our planet.
“Silent Conflicts”
NEW DELHI Visual Arts Gallery, India Habitat Centre Curator Ashna Singh, director of Studio Art Gallery in New Delhi, made a brilliant selection of 12 artists whose work differs in terms of material, medium, and vision. Yet his choices sat comfortably together, showcasing inner conflict in all its dimensions.
