John Monti: Beyond Irony

Brooklyn-based John Monti is a mid-career sculptor who has moved from a Minimalist background toward a Pop stance that catches the eye through travesty. Once a maker of cool, lozenge-like wall reliefs, he now deliberately oversteps the line of good taste with works such as Cluster Study I (2012), a table-top work of urethane resin

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Maria Cristina Carlini: The Aesthetics of Authenticity

Last year, Milan’s Fondazione Mudima and Fondazione Stelline co-hosted a retrospective of Maria Cristina Carlini’s sculptures, including large-scale works, maquettes, and preparatory drawings. It was a good opportunity to study the work of an important Italian artist (born and raised in Varese), who is not so well known—despite her track record of exhibitions in public

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Absalon

Tel Aviv Tel Aviv Museum of Art Twenty years have passed since the death of the Israeli-French artist Absalon at the age of 29. This show, a revised version of a comprehensive exhibition mounted two years ago at Berlin’s KW Institute of Contemporary Art, featured installations, sculptures, models, preparatory sketches, and video works loaned from

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Thomas Morrissey

Providence AS220 Project Space An in-your-face, freedom-of-speech quality informed Thomas Morrissey’s recent installation about the summary worth of creative endeavor. His life’s work was arranged, boxed, labeled with limited descriptions, and given a by-the-pound valuation. Heavy-duty, locked chain-link gates made the collection inaccessible, and an overhead security camera remained trained on his intellectual and artistic

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Rona Pondick

New York Sonnabend Gallery When Rona Pondick’s sculptural installations first appeared in the mid-1980s, their raw expression of abjection, feminist rage, infantile greed, and intimations of mortality was startling. Roughly made, her unsettling works were ambivalent, psychological, and completely uncanny: elongated lead beds, beds protruding baby bottles like teats, weird agglomerations of children’s shoes and

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Miroslaw Balka

New York Gladstone Gallery Miroslaw Balka’s 2 x (350 x 300 x 300), 36 x 36 x 29 / The Order of Things—a large-scale, welded sculpture of weathering steel—is an obverse rhomboid, split into two equal sections with darkened water pouring into each half.

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