A round-up of the best sculpture park and garden shows of the season (part one of two).
Aaron Curry
SINGAPORE STPI Creative Workshop & Gallery Aaron Curry’s ebullient sculptures, recently surveyed in “Fragments from a Collective Unity,” are stretched, swollen, sometimes barbed, and slightly off-kilter. A plethora of organic-looking things filled an entire wall, some wriggling from side to side, some becoming jack-in-the-boxes and popping up from an opening here or there, and yet others more closely approximating bones and remains than life itself.
Phyllida Barlow
LONDON Royal Academy of Arts As “cul-de-sac” demonstrates, Barlow’s skill in courting accident and chance remains unsurpassed. While her materials—plaster, cement, steel, wire mesh, plywood, timber, and fabric—are rooted in the sculptural canon, her methods of deployment are freed from any past constraints.
Jorge Palacios: Passion for Perfection
In The Noguchi Museum garden, Jorge Palacios’s Weightless Movement (2018) hung from a large Japanese katsura tree—integrated with earth, sky, and Noguchi’s stone and clay sculptures. “The title is a joke,” Palacios explained, “because it’s impossible to have gravity without weight.”
deCordova New England Biennial 2019
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum A few years ago, the deCordova Museum, famed for its outdoor sculpture collection, transposed its name in order to focus attention on the sculpture park. Yet in choosing this edgy group of 2019 biennial artists, exhibition curators gave short shrift to those who work in three dimensions, admitting only a handful.
News of the Week
David Kordansky will now represent sculptor Simone Leigh on the West Coast. She will continue to be represented by Luhring Augustine in New York. Expo Chicago has announced its 2019 participating galleries. For a full list click here.
Gutting History: A Conversation with Cristina Piffer
Cristina Piffer’s works do not permit indifference. Small objects by this Argentinian artist can be just as impressive as her large-scale installations, with a formal elegance that captures the attention while moving viewers into a universe where life and death are locked in permanent tension.
Ajlan Gharem
VANCOUVER Vanier Park Six months after Ajlan Gharem’s Paradise Has Many Gates was unveiled in Vancouver’s beachfront Vanier Park, the little mosque made of chain link and steel pipe began to feel like part of the scenery.
“The Death of James Lee Byars”
VENICE Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione The installation’s aesthetic appeal resonates universally with its emphasis on beauty and absence. For those familiar with Byars’s work, it furthers his legacy of conceptual vigor, exploring the unknown and unknowable.
Experience Transposed: A Conversation with Gianni Caravaggio
Gianni Caravaggio works with diverse materials, creating mysterious forms that aim to open the imagination. Born in Rocca San Giovanni (Chieti), Italy, in 1968, he soon moved with his family to Germany. He studied philosophy before moving back to Italy to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he is currently a professor
