Sarah Lucas has a feeling for materials that quite simply takes your breath away, a formidable command over sculptural form, a knack for striking compositions and juxtapositions, an abiding interest in charged and often politically incorrect content, and a deliciously wicked sense of humor.
March/April 2020
March/April 2020
Alienating Effects: A Conversation with Guillaume Leblon
Guillaume Leblon’s works are difficult to categorize, occupying the space in between things. He considers his sculpture and installations to be like “fleeting memories, blurring the boundaries of real and surreal,” with “a strong and seductive material presence.”
States of Flux: A Conversation with Jes Fan
Jes Fan’s work unspools complexities, unifies diversities, and creates new forms of beauty. His unique vision includes abstract systems that allude to gender and racial distinctions as well as to outer/inner structures, merging art, science, philosophy, and cultural histories.
Francesca DiMattio
LONDON Pippy Houldsworth DiMattio, who is based in New York, started out as a painter of monumental, boundary-pushing canvases that played with optical illusion and references to the history of art, design, and architecture. She translated this fluidity of approach to clay when she took up the medium in 2010.
Generative Proliferation: A Conversation with Martha Russo
Boulder, Colorado-based Martha Russo pushes the boundaries of ceramics, using abstract forms freighted with references to biology, anatomy, and the purely fantastical. Three years ago, her retrospective “Coalescere,” at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, summed up 25 years of art-making.
Anna Estarriola
HELSINKI Galerie Anhava Estarriola’s dynamic grab bag of sights, sounds, and situations communicated on visual, intellectual, emotional, and physical levels, demonstrating her ability to manifest the idiosyncratic and ambiguous hunches and impressions that inform our reality in concrete terms.
Bharti Kher
SOMERSET, U.K. Hauser & Wirth In “A Wonderful Anarchy,” Bharti Kher presented new works produced during a three-month residency with Hauser & Wirth Somerset in 2017. An array of found objects expressed her interest in the dual concepts of the mythological and scientific, the secular and ritualistic, and the physical and psychological.
Human Here and Now: A Conversation with Millicent Young
Millicent Young uses poor materials—horsehair, in particular—to create lyrical abstractions that resemble ancient artifacts or inspired attempts at joining the timeless elements of nature to a contemporary point of view. Educated at Wesleyan University and the University of Virginia, with an MFA from James Madison University, she has always followed her own path.
Susan Collis: Looking at the Overlooked
At first glance, Susan Collis’s “Without you the world goes on,” at the Des Moines Art Center last year, looked more like an after-hours jobsite or an installation in progress than a finished art exhibition. Bundles of wood, a pair of worker’s overalls, a table, ladder, and chair, brooms, some drop cloths, a storage bag, even a tattered blue plastic tarp lay scattered about or were haphazardly pinned to the walls.
Mrinalini Mukherjee
NEW YORK The Met Breuer The work of Mrinalini Mukherjee (1949–2015) is astounding, melding craft, high concept, and humor with the consequences of pressing Modernism through the sieve of traditional Indian cultural forms. Her sculptures are overtly sensual, referencing aspects of human sexuality and the fecundity of nature. Both simple and complex, they play at the boundaries between abstract and figurative, artificial and natural.