LOS ANGELES Hauser & Wirth The enigmatic press release for Hammons’s recent exhibition contains only the words “This exhibition is dedicated to / Ornette / Coleman / Harmolodic Thinker / David Hammons,” superimposed over a freeform drawing of squiggled, wavering horizontal and vertical lines. The press release not only set the tone for this sprawling, theatrical show, it also manifested Hammons’s total control over the display and public presentation of his work within the context of one of the world’s most powerful galleries.
Carel Visser
THE HAGUE Museum Beelden aan Zee The survey demonstrated that Visser (1928–2015), one of the Netherlands’ most important 20th-century sculptors, was guided by a deep-seated need to make things, that he employed a remarkably diverse range of themes, materials, and techniques to actualize his ideas and observations, and that he rarely—if ever—acquiesced to artistic trends.
Maarten Vanden Eynde: Digging Into the Future
Maarten Vanden Eynde’s work travels back from the future. Fast-forwarding 100 million years or so in the role of a forensic archaeologist, he digs up archaic strata of earth—a smelted stew of plastic, metal, and organic gook cooked by industrial pollution.
A Conversation with Rachel Feinstein
“I decided that the whole idea of irony, which is so strong in contemporary art, I didn’t want to do anymore; I wanted to make it all about heart and really open my body up and say, ‘Here I am, I’m revealing myself to you.’ Because that’s what I saw in old art, and it melted me.”
Mesa Servida: Una Conversación con Miriam Hecht
Habiendo incursionado en la pintura, el textil, las instalaciones y la producción de objetos, Hecht encuentra en lo efímero de los “banquetes temáticos” su vehículo de comunicación con el otro, creando situaciones performáticas opulentas y barrocas, para compartir en torno a una mesa.
Carl Lee
BROOKLYN Undercurrent Gallery “Myoptic,” a sculptural video installation by Carl Lee, contemplated the intricate twining of spectatorship, memory, and technology. The title, a play on the word “myopic,” strongly underscores this notion: “myopic” means nearsighted, not being able to see the wider view without some sort of corrective lens; “myoptic” seems to indicate a more personal spectatorship, the nostalgic lens through which we each, individually, experience the past.
Video: Celebrating the Work of Alan Constable
Alan Constable’s singular sculptures of cameras, telescopes, projectors, and binoculars are imbued with a heightened tactility and inner life. Legally blind and deaf, Constable began constructing replicas of cameras from cereal cartons and glue at the age of eight.
Spatial Language: A Conversation with Ragen Moss
“I am interested in sculpture as the medium that can teach us what space is and why space is important. I come at this because I see each of us as being an awkward, bumbling biological body that is also inscribed by language. This friction between being a physical spatial being and also a thinking, relational spatial being is what generates my work.”
Lydia Okumura
LONDON Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac Okumura has stated that “geometry is an intelligent way to express the concept of multi-dimensionality, an aspect of the truth of life.” This exhibition therefore provided an opportunity to re-evaluate the intricate multi-dimensionality of a group of five key sculptures from the 1984 show, which exemplified a decisive year in her artistic trajectory.
Brendan Fernandes
CHICAGO Monique Meloche Brendan Fernandes’s new works cast bondage in bronze. His current exhibition, “Restrain” (on view through January 11, 2020), features bronze coils suspended by leather straps from live-edge walnut supports. Titles inject context, connecting these looping suspensions to the formations of kinbaku, or “tight binding,” the Japanese practice of aestheticized bondage.
