Shinji Turner-Yamamoto’s sculptural and photographic installations resonate with a sense of stillness, presence, and spirituality. Visiting locations with personal meaning—historic and sacred sites from Cincinnati to Jaipur and remote wilderness outposts in Ireland, Switzerland, and the Pacific Northwest—he intuitively chooses his materials.
May/June 2019
Doug Aitken
DETROIT Former State Savings Bank Doug Aitken’s Mirage—a full-sized model of a ranch-style house in which every surface is mirrored—originally occupied a site in the desert, adjacent to Palm Springs, California. For Mirage Detroit, he relocated the entire structure to the interior of a long-vacant Beaux-Arts bank building (which dates from 1900 and is attributed to architects McKim, Mead, and White) in Detroit’s Central Business District.
Gutting History: A Conversation with Cristina Piffer
Cristina Piffer’s works do not permit indifference. Small objects by this Argentinian artist can be just as impressive as her large-scale installations, with a formal elegance that captures the attention while moving viewers into a universe where life and death are locked in permanent tension.
Experience Transposed: A Conversation with Gianni Caravaggio
Gianni Caravaggio works with diverse materials, creating mysterious forms that aim to open the imagination. Born in Rocca San Giovanni (Chieti), Italy, in 1968, he soon moved with his family to Germany. He studied philosophy before moving back to Italy to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he is currently a professor
Petah Coyne
NEW YORK Galerie Lelong & Co. Petah Coyne’s recent solo show in New York, after too long an absence, clearly demonstrated that she has lost none of her visual and narrative verve.
Puzzling Perception: A Conversation with Tauba Auerbach
Tauba Auerbach, whose aesthetic investigations break the mold, has described her work as an attempt to reveal “new spectral and dimensional richness…both within and beyond the limits of perception.”
Perla Krauze and Barbara Liotta
WASHINGTON, DC Mexican Cultural Institute Krauze and Liotta offer a different take on the pursuit of uncluttered intentionality that is at once rooted in the sensual exploration of stone and a need for order. While aspects of Land Art and Minimalism inspire both artists, Krauze engages viscerally with the land and the materiality of stone, traveling to the border to gather shards.
Tania Bruguera
LONDON Tate Modern Thanks to a series of experiential interventions by Cuban artist and activist Tania Bruguera, a street fair atmosphere recently took hold of Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall. In the central space, children performed cartwheels and people pressed limbs to a heat-sensitive floor, watching delightedly as ghostly imprints surfaced.
Red Grooms: Benign Satire
It makes total sense to learn that Red Grooms was helped on his way toward his distinctive sculptural forms by an oddball comic strip. Smokey Stover, so named for the central character, featured a fireman who always wore his helmet back to front, and it got the attention of Charles Rogers Grooms, a Nashville schoolboy with a phobia about fire.
Seward Johnson: Against Propriety
Recipient of the 2020 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award Seward Johnson, whose artistic and professional career as a sculptor spans more than 50 years, initially received wide critical acclaim in the 1960s for his first work, Stainless Girl.
