Mae West, 2011. Carbon-fiber, 171 x 105 ft.

Rita McBride: (Re) Negotiating the Public Realm

American artist Rita McBride has spent the past decade living and working in Germany. She can be characterized as a sculptor with a passion for probing materials previously unexplored in the arts or at the cutting edge of research. Her works typically investigate the conventions of architecture while attempting to pinpoint the—sometimes ugly, sometimes humorous—underbelly of the public realm. Some critics have struggled to define McBride’s work, noting her unusually wide range of materials and projects, including several collaborative books. Writing about McBride’s 2010 Kunstmuseum Winterthur exhibition, Dieter Schwarz characterizes her work as defying congruence and emphasizes the intellectual (rejecting the term “conceptual”) nature of her approach. …see the entire article in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.