Entering a Matthew Ronay exhibition is like walking through a deserted kindergarten, with ice-cream-colored sculptures strewn around a play area. Ronay, who approaches his creative configurations with genuine curiosity, attributes his childlike approach to color blindness and an insistence on scribbling things down.
Sterling Ruby: Monument Material
A precocious 12-year-old once rolled her eyes at me after I described an artist as a “Renaissance man.” When I asked her what was wrong, she said “I hate that phrase. It’s so vague, it’s meaningless.
I Am the Background: A Conversation with Dan Colen
Dan Colen, who applies himself to painting, placards, and sculpture with equal bravado, likens his approach to that of a child enthused first by one idea and then another. He explains his work as closer to a permanent condition than a series of disconnected objects.
Sabotage: A Conversation with Minerva Cuevas
Minerva Cuevas, who came to prominence in the 1990s as part of a group of socially engaged Mexican artists responding to political corruption, NAFTA, and the government’s embrace of neoliberal economic policies, works across sculpture, installation, photography, painting, video, and performance.
Gelatin
ROTTERDAM Museum Boijmans van Beuningen According to Gelatin member Wolfgang Gantner, “The question isn’t why poop, but why not poop?” A video discussion accompanying the group’s recent show of monumental turd sculptures further clarifies the choice of subject matter with references to “democratic art” and how we all create it, starting at the earliest age.
Indian Ceramics Triennale
JAIPUR Jawaharlal Kala Kendra Set in the gloriously restored Jawaharlal Kala Kendra (JKK) arts center in Jaipur, the first Indian Ceramics Triennale (ICT) kicked off
Charles Ray
NEW YORK Matthew Marks Gallery Charles Ray has produced some of the most consequential sculpture of the past 30 years.
Giuseppe Penone
WEST BRETTON, WAKEFIELD, UK Yorkshire Sculpture Park “A Tree in the Wood,” a beguiling exhibition spanning five decades, makes clear Giuseppe Penone’s lifelong obsession with the symbiotic relationship between trees and humans.
Futurefarmers
SAN FRANCISCO Yerba Buena Center for the Arts “Out of Place, in Place,” Futurefarmers’s recent retrospective, offered members of the collective a chance to think about the concerns that have driven their work since 1995.
Julia Phillips
NEW YORK MoMA PS1 Julia Phillips’s minimally expressed and disturbing works suggest isolated body parts placed in conjunction with elements that evoke instruments of torture or at least cold mechanics.
