December 2013

Kishio Suga: Stealth Objects

Looking at Kishio Suga’s work is like watching a photograph develop: it makes itself available gradually, subtly, indirectly, yielding its content slowly. It’s sculpture that flies under the radar, taking you by surprise. Suga believes that concepts exist in physical things before they’re used in an object and that the artist’s task is to reveal

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55th Venice Biennale

Venice The 55th Venice Biennale was less about art world trends and more about real world issues. There was Cuban art about escape, Angolan art about the remnants of an impoverished society, Chinese art about the invasion of privacy at airports, and Hungarian art about bombs that, in both world wars, were fired but didn’t

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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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