St. Louis Christina Shmiget’s Chinese Garden for the Delights of Roaming Afar was a poetic, purposefully bewildering, multi-room installation inspired by the artist’s recent relocation from St. Louis to Shanghai….see the full review in March’s magazine.
March 2006
Dietrich Klinge
Grand Rapids, Michigan ln his first U.S. museum show, Dietrich Klinge reveals his probing concerns and expressive strategies, long familiar in his native Germany, but untiI now mostly unnoticed here….see the full review in March’s magazine.
Richard Cleaver
Baltimore Richard Cleaver’s disptay of over 100 hand-built and painted ceramic figures cast a spell akin to the effect of Laura’s glass animals in Tennessee Williams’s <iGlass Menagerie</i….see the full review in March’s magazine.
Temporary Services
Los Angeles It has become commonplace to describe the city of Los Angeles as an anti-city and to decry its physical and sociaI fragmentation….see the full review in March’s magazine.
Toshiko Takaezu
Los Angeles Honored as a Living Treasure in her native Hawaii, Toshiko lakaezu is known for her audaciously sealed ceramic vessels….see the full review in March’s magazine.
Joe Willie Smith
Phoenix Joe Willie Smith’s new wall sculptures incorporate deiritus that describes the specific local environments of abandoned auto racetracks, churches, empty lots, and train yards. …see the full review in March’s magazine.
Brian Jungen
New York With an emphasis on craft and an engagement with 20th-century art history, Brian Jungen explores tensions between cultures in the global world. …see the full review in March’s magazine.
Kan Yasuda: Between Mind and Matter
Just as a great singer can use his voice at full volume or at the most disembodied of pianissimi, so Kan Yasuda can convey the full range of sculptural emotions as convincingly by the exploitation of powerfully expansive sculptural mass as by tender, almost imperceptible formal modulations.
Jorge Oteiza: Nothing is Everything
The Guggenheim Museum of Art recently held the first comprehensive retrospective in New York of Jorge Oteiza (1908–2003), a formidable figure in the history of 20th-century Basque art. His work (represented in the exhibition by 125 sculptures, drawings, and collages) is particularly interesting for its range of influences, which include Neolithic cultures and the avant-garde
Transforming Energy: A Conversation with Jaume Plensa
A young man once approached Jean Cocteau and asked the master what he should do to become a successful artist. Cocteau responded with three words: “Faites-moi étonner!” (“Amaze me!”) Looking at Jaume Plensa’s works, one gets the impression that he had been that young artist and had taken Cocteau’s recommendation to heart.
