NEW YORK Kasmin
It’s vocabulary that reminds us how mathematics and philosophy like to orbit one another. Finite and infinite, rational and irrational, predictable and unpredictable, determinate and indeterminate—these are crucial complements to French conceptual artist Bernar Venet, who employs indeterminacy as both a mathematical concept and a philosophical guidepost.
“The impetus for Spaghetti Blockchain came from looking at YouTube for endless hours. Also, I’ve been considering different definitions of materialism—as a philosophical term, what it means in capitalism, and how we are composed of matter.”
Sculpture portable enough to fit in the palm of your hand, inside a pocket, or tucked into a wallet can also be invested with enough narrative power to tell an epic story. The newly published catalogue, The Scher Collection of Commemorative Medals, proves that sculpture the size of a silver dollar can assume the presence of something monumental.
Over the course of six days in 2003 during the American invasion of Iraq, more than 3,000 artifacts on display at the Iraqi National Museum in Baghdad were looted or destroyed. For Michael Rakowitz, an American artist of Jewish-Iraqi heritage, the desecration was personal, and it inspired an ambitious sculptural project.
“The formal solutions that I choose pretend to be coherent with the ideas that I propose. In an artwork, everything has meaning: scale, material, support, the space where things happen…In my work, the awareness of that mechanism is part of the content.”
“The idea of a hybrid for me represents human potential, super-human powers, and the feeling of being in transition as well as being alienated.”
María Silvia Corcuera habita la piel de una “artista fémina curiosa”—tal sus palabras—que va sumando experiencias y con cierta cuota lúdica aborda el terreno de lo popular latinoamericano y su transculturación.
“Baby Tycoons,” an exhibition of John Chamberlain’s small, tabletop sculptures, is on view at Hauser & Wirth through October 19. The first exhibition of Chamberlain’s work since the gallery took over representation of the John Chamberlain Estate in May 2019, it is installed in the gallery’s 69th Street space.
Sterritt’s work prods insistently at the gaps between natural and manufactured, anonymity and authorship, between art, craft, and mass production.
Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset employ performance, installation, design, and corrupted advertising to subvert collective sensibilities. They come at the objects and assumptions that rationalize our lives with an adolescent energy, protesting against the moroseness of maturity and refusing to surrender to the status quo.
