NEW YORK 303 Gallery “All We Need is Inside,” the name of Jeppe Hein’s third exhibition at 303 Gallery, was also the title of a work that set a strong thematic precedent for the exhibition. All We Need is Inside consists of a two-way mirror, with neon lettering behind it spelling out the title. Viewers seeing their reflection are alerted to the immediacy of their presence within the communal space of the gallery and in relation to adjacent works. Confronting viewers with their own image is a recurring dynamic in Hein’s practice.
Archive
Tara Donovan
NEW YORK Pace Gallery Drawing seems a misnomer for Tara Donovan’s new two-dimensional works. The 14 works, all titled Drawing (Pins), were created with a method that she began using in 2009 and date from 2011 to the present. For each piece, Donovan pressed hundreds of thousands of straight pins into painted white Gator Boards to create simple geometric shapes divided into bands of gray: circles, squares, diamonds and crosses. While the works are sold individually, most of them fall into pairs that offer both the positive and inverse of a given shape in grayscale.
Yoan Capote
NEW YORK Jack Shainman Gallery Yoan Capote is among the politically conscious artists currently enjoying eased constraints in Cuba, where Fidel Castro, in 1959, established a Communist regime 90 miles from the U.S. coast. With his pulse attuned to his native culture and his heart beating at a free-world pace, Capote treads terrain still hot-wired with reprisals for dissidence. His works, strongly rooted in local tradition, grow to universal proportions as he deftly detours around homegrown maladies to project his message onto a global stage.
El Anatsui
KINDERHOOK, NEW YORK The School Gallerist Jack Shainman’s outpost of culture in upstate New York did a terrific job of exhibiting 50 years of work by the Ghana-born, Nigeria-based artist El Anatsui. Now in his 70s, he has had a long, prolific career fashioning shimmering panels out of bottle caps linked to each other with copper wire. After beginning his artistic career as a good painter, El Anatsui is now known as a remarkable sculptor. Early on, he worked with African ceramics.
Ruth Hardinger
BROOKLYN, NEW YORK Long Island University Ruth Hardinger’s recent show, “The Basement Rocks,” arose out of her concern about how fuel extraction disturbs the earth’s foundational strata. Functioning like the best science fiction, Hardinger’s activist work projects well-founded fears into the near future, her totem-like sculptures acting as harbingers for anthro-induced ecological ruin. “The Basement Rocks” displayed an impulse toward immersive installation, although the sculptures themselves felt like individual studio experiments. Gray floors, ashen concrete sculptures, and the ovoid shape of the all-glass gallery all evoked a kind of post-industrial Zen garden.
Bill Georgenes
SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO Santa Fe Community College Visual Arts Gallery Bill Georgenes’s recent work defies expectations. It is fresh and intensely focused. Made from cheap plastic toys, his constructions could be the fabrications of a young artist, yet Georgenes is a man in his mid-80s, who studied at Yale when Josef Albers was on the faculty. Georgenes’s early works were paintings, elegant and abstract, just what one would have expected from an artist with a Yale education. Yet 23 years ago, he began creating sculptures that were very different from anything he had previously made, finding his most personal creative voice.
Jay Critchley
PROVINCETOWN, MASSACHUSETTS Provincetown Art Association and Museum Jay Critchley creatively uses the codified capitalist convention of incorporation. As a CEO, he orchestrates his participation in public discourse, with fascinating outcomes regarding AIDS/HIV, nuclear energy, the carbon footprint, the impact of offshore sewage dumping, and development destabilization. His conceptualist activism is subversive. “Jay Critchley, Incorporated,” a recent retrospective curated by Bailey Bob Bailey, explored 30 years of interventionist practices.
“S, M, L, XL”
CHICAGO Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago “S, M, L, XL,” organized by Michael Darling, chief curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art, took its title from a Rem Koolhaas book of the same name—a 1,376-page tome, published in 1995 for OMA (Office for Metropolitan Architecture), that contains essays, manifestos, diaries, fiction, travelogues, and reflections on the contemporary city as a place of change and ever-increasing scale. Unlike that innovative book, which was complex in scope and execution, this show was somewhat simplistic in its concept—it basically invited viewers to interact with sculpture.
“When You Cut into the Present the Future Leaks Out”
BRONX, NEW YORK Old Bronx Borough Courthouse Installed in the Old Bronx Borough Courthouse, a grand Beaux-Arts-style building built between 1905 and 1914 and undergoing renovation after it was closed for 37 years, “When You Cut into the Present the Future Leaks Out” featured the work of 26 artists invited by curator Regine Basha. Organized by No Longer Empty, a nonprofit group that presents curated exhibitions and public programs in underused spaces, the show took its title from William S. Burroughs.
Ruud Kuijer: Collage and Casting
At first sight, Ruud Kuijer’s “Waterworks,” seven monumental cast concrete constructions installed along the Amsterdam-Rhine canal, are a surprise. The enormous, pale “towers” seem unlikely in this nondescript, industrial area near the entrance to Utrecht harbor.
