Like much post-conceptual art, a new group of works by the nomadic, Italian-born Not Vital rejects explicit interpretation in favor of an open approach to meaning. These sculptures, which recall landscapes, animals, and body fragments, exist in a half-familiar, but distorted world beyond the everyday.
Archive
Erick Swenson
DALLAS Nasher Sculpture Center The work of Erick Swenson has a visceral appeal. In Scuttle, for instance, a meticulously detailed conch holds the body of a sea snail halted in the midst of its wriggling. At once tongue-like and pudendal, the elongated end of the snail’s body emerges erect, while its broader half wraps around the hard outer shell, squeezing it in a stranglehold.
Richard Artschwager
NEW YORK Leo Castelli Gallery Richard Artschwager’s work is not exactly Pop in the sense of Oldenburg’s sculpture or, for that matter, works by George Segal, Marjorie Strider, or Robert Indiana. The question has arisen more than once as to whether Artschwager belongs in the category of Pop at all. But where else?
Steve Lambert
LINCOLN, MASSACHUSETTS deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum It looks like a chunk of retro advertising that fell off a building in Times Square: white light bulbs spelling out, in gigantic letters, CAPITALISM. Below, script adds, “Works for me!” On either side comes the kicker: “True” or “False.”
Donald Moffett
NEW YORK Marianne Boesky Gallery Donald Moffett continually finds new ways to make paintings. A decade ago, he projected moving figurative images onto monochromatic supports of oil and enamel on linen.
Arnaldo Pomodoro: Voyage Through the Labyrinth
Arnaldo Pomodoro’s most significant “sign” is personal but recognizable, though many people—including perhaps the artist himself when he began his exploration more than 50 years ago—are unable to explain its meaning. The image of the labyrinth surfaces in Pomodoro’s earliest works, including Moon, Sun, Tower (1955), Sun Nutriment (1955), Horizon (1956), and Mark (1957).
Uglycute
STOCKHOLM Marabouparken It may seem unorthodox and even premature to stage a retrospective of a career that has only lasted for 13 years, but then Uglycute, the Swedish art and design collective, is neither conventional nor concerned with timeliness. Furthermore, the four members of Uglycute—Markus Degerman, Andreas Nobel, Jonas Nobel, and Fredrik Stenberg—have created such a vast number of furniture pieces, exhibition designs, and environments that their retrospective was both rich and rewarding.
Akio Takamori and Tip Toland
NEW YORK Barry Friedman Ltd. Akio Takamori and Tip Toland are both figurative clay artists, but any similarity between them ends there. Takamori is a lyrically inclined, Japanese-born sculptor who now teaches at the University of Washington, while Toland is a hyperrealist from Seattle who specializes in portraying the elderly.
Dressing Up Sculpture: A Conversation with Pepe Mar
Pepe Mar’s sculptures pulse with vivid color and small elements—cut-up slivers of paper, tiny objects—that when assembled form quasi-creatures. The New York Times described his early exhibition “Hunga Bunga” as personifying “the visually devouring soul of modern mass media.”
Elias Crespin
NEW YORK Cecilia de Torres, Ltd. Elias Crespin is a 21st-century wizard in a virtual Oz. In “Parallels,” the New York debut of his kinetic sculpture, he dazzled viewers with works consisting of simple lines and shapes. At first glance, they appeared to be suspended in space, their movements the whim of a capricious breeze. But nature was nowhere present.
