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.
Object Lessons: Melvin Edwards
Agricole, the suspended plow form, comes from the French for “agriculture.” Human beings didn’t start out in cities. Cities originated as places of exchange, and now they’ve gotten to the point where something that used to happen once a week or once a month—the trading of goods and services—becomes the dominator.
Simone Leigh in New York
Like the braided clay that adorns some of her ceramic sculptures, Leigh’s practice articulates a richly interwoven narrative of recuperation, resistance, restitution, and healing that directly addresses this core viewership even as it puts the broader public on notice.
Pae White: Material History
Pae White’s primary material might well be the history of applied arts. In a new show at the San José Museum of Art (on view through January 19, 2020), she draws on at least 2,000 years of artistic practice, from goldwork to carpet weaving, bookbinding, printmaking, and painting.
Tradition and Independence: A Conversation with Lin Yan
Lin Yan belongs to a distinguished line of Chinese artists. Her grandfather and grandmother were pioneers of modern art in China, and her parents, Lin Gang and Pang Tao, opened the Central Academy of Fine Art oil painting studio in the 1980s.
“Metamorphosis. Art in Europe Now”
PARIS Fondation Cartier
Thomas Delamarre, senior curator for the Fondation Cartier, didn’t know what he would learn when he visited 200 European artists who came of age after the fall of the Berlin Wall. How, he wondered, did the still politically charged landscape of today shape their perspectives and impact their work?
Esculpir la Existencia: Una Conversación con Laura Nucenovich
“Entiendo mis imágenes desde la presencia/cuerpo y desde lo que a partir de la materia se silencia. El espacio hace a la poética, no sólo lo relaciono con la intimidad y las distancias, sino también con las proyecciones de sus sombras.”
Echiko Ohira
LOS ANGELES Craft Contemporary For me, the hallmarks of singularity in an art object are to be found in certain manifested obsessions, idiosyncratic techniques, and animating tensions. Echiko Ohira’s complexly reductive works declare that singularity by way of a compulsive tropism toward simple, repetitive, labor-intensive techniques.
Suffering and Desire: A Conversation with Berlinde De Bruyckere
Berlinde De Bruyckere’s raw, visceral sculptures embody death, life, passion, and vulnerability. Through the 1990s and 2000s, she made life-size, cast wax sculptures of bodies that crouch, huddle, arch, writhe, and merge into one another in ecstatic Baroque agony.
“Alice, Neeme & Jass”
HELSINKI Kunsthalle Helsinki
The unassuming title could not have been any more paradoxical, effectively belying the vitality of the work created by Alice Kask, Neeme Külm, and Jass Kaselaan, three Estonian artists. Their objects not only played off each other, but also responded astutely to the spaces in which they were set.
