TRENT, ITALY Civica/MART Civica, the Trent branch of MART, Italy’s lauded contemporary art museum, ingeniously structured Stefano Cagol’s mid-career retrospective into a cycle that evoked the return of the native son to the site of his first exhibition. Beginning with an early self-portrait (1998) compounded into four states of motion, the show traced the paradigm shift that characterizes two decades of Cagol’s work. Unity through duality is a chief preoccupation, from early video experiments to September 11 (2009), an LED of memorial events on his birthday.

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ROTTERDAM Museum of Boijmans Van Beuningen Maybe it is a good idea to fill a museum with 45 life-like sculptures of clowns supplemented by colorful, rainbow-inspired and cartoon-like works—or maybe not. In any event, Ugo Rondinone chose to do just this in his recent exhibition, “Vocabulary of Solitude,” which also doubled as a retrospective of his color spectrum works. This was one of the weirdest art experiences I’ve had in some time, prompting a PTSD-like reaction similar to those I had in response to the 1980s horror films of my youth.

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HAMILTON, ONTARIO, CANADA Art Gallery of Hamilton Catherine Heard’s sculptures are disturbing and ethereal, revealing the restraints of corporeal being as well as the intangibles of the soul/creativity. Myrllen: A Portrait, for instance, has indistinct, rounded features akin to Pompeian remains—empty eye sockets and vague features. The graygreen head was created from hundreds of thin layers of linen, lace, paper, clay, and wax. The only external evidence of this laborious process is a rough, compressed texture; a fabric mandala is pressed into its crown.

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LONDON LAMB Arts Détournement, the act of decomposing and redistributing cultural value, resists literal translation but finds its closest approximation in “culture jamming.” Détournement is a turn, but it is also a confrontation. It is not just veering from the road, but ripping cobblestones from the road and lobbing them. As Guy Debord and Gil Wolman saw it, “The cheapness of its products is the heavy artillery that breaks through the Chinese walls of understanding.”

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BUENOS AIRES Centro Cultural Recoleta In “The First Day,” Augusto Zanela— an architect, photographer, and teacher—highlights some of the concerns that have driven his work since 1996, when he began investigating the processes of image formation as applied to photography, video, and installation. He is particularly interested in optical tricks and structures created in the viewer’s space—both physical and mental. Following a rigorous plan, his recent exhibition of three installations established a dialogue across words, colors, and forms through the effects of light.

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NEW YORK gallery nine5 LeRone Wilson’s encaustic sculpture is abstract, Minimalist, and geometric yet loaded with individualizing touches. The highly textured and boldly colored surfaces are intense. The titles, such as Divine Circle, Stars Rained on Me, Homage to Ra (Sun), Distinction Between One Color, Universal Journey, and Footsteps of My Ancestor’s Harkhuf, refer to spiritual, mythological, and philosophical concepts. “Universal Journey,” the exhibition title, alludes to human history in general, and more specifically, to historic Egyptian uses of encaustic.

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NEW YORK LMAKgallery Four pretzel-like, inflated tubular shapes hung just overhead in a backyard “garden,” held in place by clear monofilament fishing line. Colored yellow, pink, red, and light blue, each form ranged between three and four feet in size. The red one, Voice Inversion, revealed the most complex entanglement of inverted twists, forming a continuous Möbius strip of sorts. Though the other forms were completely monochromatic, the red piece featured a transparent section. These works might be thought of as super weird beach balls—a good selection for a summer show.

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NEW YORK Art Mora Renee Magnanti is a highly gifted artist who carves encaustic to reveal layers of wax, often with a brightly hued background. Her work relates to the women’s decorative art movement, part of the feminist art drive of the 1970s and ’80s, when she was recently out of art school. Her carvings frequently include phrases or sentences about women from the faraway textile cultures whose patterns she sometimes borrows. Inevitably, her work brings up the question of craft and the long clichéd debate over whether decorative art can be taken seriously.

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NEW WINDSOR, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Over a long and productive career, Dennis Oppenheim produced conceptual art, body art, earthworks, and sculpture. Now, five years after his death, the many phases of his artistic life are being celebrated as never before, in a perfect setting. His evolution from performance artist to creator of land projects and sculptural installations has found full-scale realization at Storm King Art Center (through November 13). Grassy fields accommodate several land projects, originally designed in the 1960s and positioned outdoors for the first time.

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