NEW YORK Sundaram Tagore Gallery A first impression of Zheng Lu’s recent exhibition, “Undercurrent,” brought to mind the term “sublime.” Set against pristine white walls, huge silvery waves seemed about to crash through space. The obvious association was to Hokusai’s 19th-century print The Great Wave off Kanagawa, but stylistically, Zheng’s waves have more in common with Northern Song black ink painting, adapted in Japan as Sumi-e, whose sharply delineated brushwork has been compared to samurai sword strokes by the prominent Asian scholar Sherman E. Lee.
Archive
Tove Storch
HALIFAX, NOVA SCOTIA, CANADA Mount Saint Vincent University Art Gallery Danish sculptor Tove Storch app roaches sculpture as a way of thinking about materials and looking at space. Arguably, so do all sculptors, but Storch harks back to Minimalists and post-Minimalists such as Donald Judd, Richard Serra, and Jackie Winsor in her refusal to allow thoughts about anything else to intrude on her work. The content of Storch’s work is, quite simply, space and stuff, presented within the theater of the gallery.
Yaacov Dorchin
TEL AVIV Gordon Gallery Stella Maris, a colossal, open-ended ship’s hull made of discarded, rusted iron components from an industrial turbine, stood at the entrance to a recent exhibition by veteran Israeli sculptor Yaacov Dorchin. A confrontational work in terms of size, bulk, and apparent symbolism, Stella Maris offers a clue to its meaning on the base, which incorporates an iron Star of David.
Rhonda Zwillinger
ROTTERDAM Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen Rhonda Zwillinger’s recent exhibition was unexpectedly rattling. Ten hours after the experience, I could still feel the accompanying soundtrack. The show opened a door that I found myself not wanting to cross because the situation was so troubling. Though the work progressed from tragedy toward acceptance (my wishful thinking?), it offered a disturbing story that deserves attention. Zwillinger, who was active in New York City’s East Village scene in the mid-1970s and ’80s, received widespread attention for sculptures and installations covered with beads and faux precious stones.
Carolyn Enz Hack
BRATTLEBORO, VERMONT Brattleboro Museum & Art Center Entering the Brattleboro Museum’s Mary Sommer Room project space and encountering Carolyn Enz Hack’s Change Your Mind was an experience that clearly called for opening one’s perception. The enormous spiral form, suspended on filament, filled the room like a magical life unfurling before one’s eyes, somewhat akin to a fiddlehead fern in spring. The form was so continuous that it seemed as if it would go on traveling through space.
Entang Wiharso
NEW YORK Marc Straus Gallery Entang Wiharso, based in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, and Rhode Island, titled his recent show “Promising Land.” It’s not clear if this referenced terrain is American or Indonesian, but most likely Wiharso is referring to the dream of affluence and ease identified with the U.S. and now emulated around the world. His recent work has increasingly turned toward a critique of the Americanization of global culture, looking askance at the heightened materialism that threatens to overwhelm the spiritual insight associated with Asian tradition.
Jimmie Durham
LOS ANGELES Hammer Museum
Gehard Demetz
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery “Introjection,” the title of Gehard Demetz’s recent exhibition, is a psychoanalytic term that refers to how people subconsciously absorb and identify with the beliefs and actions of others, particularly children internalizing their perceptions of parental behavior. Demetz’s rubric makes the pre-pubescent figures in the work particularly chilling. The Third Way (2017), for example, depicts a middleschool- age youngster staring disconsolately into space.
Engineering Transparency: A Conversation with Naomi Campbell
Naomi Campbell’s work fuses the art of science and the science of art. Starting with nature’s sculpted forms, she introduces new definitions of the organic and the synthetic through fragmented objects and hybridized systems that follow the concepts and connotations of natural systems.
Alfredo Pirri
ROME MARCA (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Alfredo Pirri’s recent exhibition, “i pesci non portano fucili” (“Fish Don’t Carry Guns”), was curated by Benedetta Carpi De Resmini and Ludovico Pratesi. The show was the final stage of a project with the same name initiated in November 2016 with an exhibition (“RWD– FWD”) at Pirri’s studio/archive. Pirri chose the title as a tribute to Philip K. Dick’s The Divine Invasion (1981), which imagines an unarmed society, fluid like the open sea, where one can be immersed and re-emerge, giving shape to multiform events.
