Working at the intersection of tradition and innovation, and of Eastern and Western aesthetics, Li Hongwei brings ceramic vessels into the realm of abstraction. By combining ceramic with stainless steel, he joins fragility to solidity. Before the beginning of history, the former medium transformed civilizations around the world, while the latter has ties to industry,
Jeffrey Gibson
CLINTON, NEW YORK Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art at Hamilton College A series of helmets—arguably even more extravagantly decked out—similarly conjure references across cultures and chronologies, threading together the politics, economics, and socio-religious rituals of dress, adornment, pattern, and decoration. They, and the other works in “This Is the Day” (from a Biblical psalm, hymn, and synth-pop song), activate and amplify its jurisdiction and readings.
Claudia Wieser
LONDON London Mithraeum Bloomberg SPACE Materials and epochs collide and dissolve in “Shift,” which places the Modernist-inspired forms of Berlin-based Claudia Wieser in dialogue with ancient artifacts excavated from the ruins of a Roman temple from the third century AD.
Matthew Angelo Harrison: Future Perfect
Matthew Angelo Harrison met me at Stanford University’s Automotive Innovation Facility on a brisk day in February. Surrounded by oak trees on the edge of campus, the building is clad in green corrugated metal. Inside, it is a bright, clean space with six garage bays; it looks more like a lab than a body shop.
Relationships Between Figures: A Conversation with Claudette Schreuders
Claudette Schreuders is a South African artist based in Cape Town. Her work has been exhibited in many institutions internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution, the British Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Puzzling Perception: A Conversation with Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach, whose aesthetic investigations break the mold, has described her work as an attempt to reveal “new spectral and dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception.”
Helena Hamilton: Composing in Space
Helena Hamilton, a young Northern Irish artist based in Belfast, extends the scope of sculpture by eliding drawing, installation, performance, sonic art, and interactive digital media. Meditative, immersive, and atmospheric, her interdisciplinary work places everyday physical objects such as neon tubes in counterpoint with the immaterial and the intangible.
Yoonshin Park
RIVERSIDE, ILLINOIS Riverside Arts Center An accomplished paper sculptor, the Chicago-based Park crafted each pillow in “Passing hours, space in between: I am breathing your air” from delicate white paper, seamed and sewed precisely; inside each is a hidden mechanism inducing the slightest movement in the center of the pillows, mimicking the rise and fall of a sleeping person’s torso.
William Kentridge
NEW YORK Park Avenue Armory The Head & The Load, an installation and collaborative performance piece involving almost three dozen musicians, dancers, vocalists, and spoken word performers, along with processions and projections of Kentridge’s drawings and sculptures, is set during World War I. Like all of Kentridge’s work, however, it resonates with contemporary meaning.
Joan Jonas
SOUTH HADLEY, MASSACHUSETTS Mount Holyoke College Art Museum “Promise of the Infinite,” a mini-retrospective on view through June 16, focuses on one salient theme running from Jonas’s earliest performances (captured on 16mm film) to recent installations—the mirror as metaphor and object.
