Richard Nonas’s studio, a Wunderkammer piled high with artifacts and relics, as well as past and in-progress works, unfolds with the unexpected surprises of an archaeological dig. Hunkered down within a jungle of antique vises and drills, ladders, chains, axes, arbitrarily stacked books, pulleys, rugs, handmade kayaks, and countless constructions of wood and steel are
Archive
Making Chaos Legible: A Conversation with Leonardo Drew
Leonardo Drew’s newest and largest work to date, Number 197 (on view through October 29), activates and energizes the atrium of the de Young Museum in San Francisco with an orchestrated arrangement of wall-mounted sculptural elements.
Dispatch: Venice Biennale
VENICE Venice Biennale Christine Macel, curator of the Centre Pompidou and of “Viva Arte Viva,” the 57th International Exhibition, describes art as a force for life: “Art in itself helps us to navigate in these times; its very existence is a resistance in itself… Contemporary art cannot be understood as mere representation or imitation: it is a reality tout court, an instrument of inquiry, both of the creative process and of the different questions pertaining to Humankind and the world.”
“Juxtapoz x Superflat”
VANCOUVER Vancouver Art Gallery “Juxtapoz x Superflat,” a group exhibition of 36 international artists organized by Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd and co-curated by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami and Evan Pricco, editor-in-chief of Juxtapoz Art & Culture Magazine, premiered as a four-day pop-up show at Pivot Art + Culture in Seattle; it then had a three-month run at the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Marisa Merz
NEW YORK The Met Breuer “The Sky is a Great Space” emphasized the consistency behind Marisa Merz’s body of work over chronology, starting with the larger-than-life “Living Sculpture” series (1966) at the exhibition entrance. These giant slinky-toy-like aluminum sheets hung from the ceiling in curls, spirals, and amorphous dangling “bodies”–most (excepting a wrapped armchair and a tent-like shape) without antecedent as “forms.” Breath alone could make them sway.
“so it is”
PITTSBURGH Mattress Factory The group exhibition “so it is,” curated by Belfast native John Carson, presented an impressive collection of installation work by seven artists from Northern Ireland. A practicing artist himself, Carson lived in Northern Ireland in the 1970s and ’80s during the Troubles. He drew on this experience while making his selections, choosing Ursula Burke, Willie Doherty, Rita Duffy, John Kindness, Locky Morris, Philip Napier, and Paul Seawright for their sensitivity to this volatile time of political and nationalistic conflict.
Kevin Francis Gray
NEW YORK Pace Gallery Donna Dodson and Andy Moerlein recently transformed Boston Sculptors Gallery into a new kind of Wonderland with their related shows, “Zodiac” and “Geology.” Dodson’s anthropomorphic deities, arranged in two circles, reference both Chinese and Western zodiac symbols. The archetypal figures emanate an extraordinary calm. Each takes a similar stolid stance yet clearly expresses her individuality.
Daniel Boccato
BROOKLYN The Journal Gallery Kevin Francis Gray’s recent solo exhibition found the neoclassically inspired bronze and marble sculptor making his boldest moves yet in testing the representational ideal of the human figure against a contemporary perspective. More than ever, the exploration of tensions inherent in the dichotomy between figuration and abstraction, which has defined Gray’s practice, becomes the central subject of his work.
Elizabeth Lide
ATLANTA The Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia With a focus on organizing space, Atlanta-based Elizabeth Lide explores how we shape–and are shaped by–our personal past. Her recent, multi-part installation of sculpture, drawing, and stitchery, Putting the House in Order, which marked the culmination of a 2015/16 Working Artist Project Fellowship awarded by the museum, investigated the literal and metaphorical influence of memory, family history, and accumulated domestic objects, all of which Lide believes can be both burden and assurance.
Medardo Rosso
ST. LEWIS Pulitzer Arts Foundation Though Medardo Rosso (1858–1928) is not as widely known today as he should be, a number of his contemporaries (including the influential French poet Guillaume Apollinaire) considered him to be as great a sculptor as Rodin. “Medardo Rosso: Experiments in Light and Form” addressed this omission with a visually arresting and extremely informative presentation of his works from 1882 to 1906, curated by Sharon Hecker, a leading Rosso scholar, and Tamara H. Schenkenberg, an associate curator at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation.
