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.
What To See in New York This September
Sculpture exhibitions opening in the city this month.
Critical Aspirations: A Conversation with Ilana Harris-Babou
Ilana Harris-Babou is often considered a video artist, but her practice fluidly negotiates sculpture, installation, performance, photography, and online platforms like Instagram.
Christopher Miles
SANTA BARBARA, CALIFORNIA College of Creative Studies Gallery, University of California, Santa Barbara The nine dramatic structures constituting “In Form” so agitate their surroundings that they create a distinct atmosphere independent of the space itself. Animated, highly detailed, penetrated with holes, tube-like parts, glossy excrescences, and contrasts between interior and exterior, they demand an engaged, committed process of examination.
Sensualidad 3D: Una Conversación con Eugenia Streb
Argentina pero con gran parte de su vida transcurrida entre tres países—Estados Unidos, Brasil y Argentina—Eugenia “Genia” Streb, se formó como arquitecta en Buenos Aires y completó un posgrado en Szeczin/Polonia (1986).
Mixed Messages: Mark Bradford’s What Hath God Wrought
In the late fall of 2018, an odd delivery appeared on the campus of the University of California, San Diego. From the flatbed of a trailer, construction crews unloaded five precisely machined, nearly 40-foot-long tubes.
Anne Duk Hee Jordan: Changes
Anne Duk Hee Jordan takes evolution and adaptation as her primary themes, traveling on a personal odyssey from the Neanderthal era into an imaginary vision of a post-Anthropocene future of mechanical anthropomorphic hybrids that she’s dubbed Homo-Stupidus.
Hans Op de Beeck
NEW YORK Marianne Boesky Gallery The uncanny quality of the show stemmed from the exacting observation that Op de Beeck applies to his matte-gray human figures and their interior settings, which appear as if frozen in time.
Ruth Asawa
ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI Pulitzer Arts Foundation While “Ruth Asawa: Life’s Work” did not present her life experience idealistically, her creative, ethical response to her experience and her tenacious devotion to labor became almost transcendent models of work-arounds for obstruction.
Observant By Nature: A Conversation with Malia Jensen
Malia Jensen’s work combines a keen sense of observation of the natural world with a complex sense of humor. Earthy, sensual, uncanny, ambiguous, and provocative, her sculptures are always more than what they appear to be, teasing out multi-layered narratives.
