Mount Ruapehu, the largest active volcano in New Zealand, last erupted in 2007, sending a lahar of mud, rock, and water from the mountain’s crater sweeping down the mountain. In multimedia artist Donna Huanca’s current exhibition at Ballroom Marfa, “ESPEJO QUEMADA,” the painting Ruapehus Scar translates that sense of mutating energy to the canvas.
For Jean-Michel Othoniel, glass has “opened up…a realm of endless possibilities,” allowing him to create transformative works on the edge of unreality.
Pablo Butteri feels a visceral link with nature. His works are organic and full of movement, with abstract beings emerging from labyrinths and knots. Salt, coal, glass, and silicone create enigmatic and enchanting, quasi-monochrome micro-worlds that invite viewers to follow unclear passages through dense spaces amid smoke and audiovisual projections.
CONCORD, MASSACHUSETTS Lucy Lacoste Gallery At a time when irony is a mainstream aesthetic force and the art object is frequently made coherent via the glitter of popular culture, work such as Briggs’s is rare and strangely daring. Abstraction becomes a visual manifestation of poetry, bearing literary notions of metaphor and symbolism.
LOS ANGELES Blum & Poe Pia Camil’s work has consistently engaged ideas of power, consumerism, and collectivity, using the mass-market waste of Mexico City’s urban landscape to create theoretically complex objects and participatory installations. Her new body of work, produced after she relocated from the city to the rural countryside during the pandemic, takes these themes in a different direction.
Japanese sculptor Shigeo Toya approaches nature as both a source of material and a site of hope. Very much a philosopher, he recognizes the intellectual character of the sculptural process while maintaining that the separation of art—and human life—from nature is mistaken.
MOUNTAINVILLE, NEW YORK Storm King Art Center Sarah Sze’s Fallen Sky—Storm King’s first permanent commissioned outdoor sculpture since Maya Lin installed Storm King Wavefield in 2008—resembles a silhouetted planet earth, as if photographed from space. Composed of 130 polished steel fragments nestled into native grasses, it occupies the site where a large tree once stood.
Recipient of the 2021 Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award “Whether I’m making a large or small object, I hope it will make sense to have that particular scale and form together, and that it will give off enough visual energy to shake the air around it.”
Glasgow-based Karla Black is known for boundary-pushing experiments with materials, both conventional and less so. Though her installations employing toothpaste, cosmetics, and powdered custard might come to mind first, plaster powder—albeit frequently in raw form—remains her primary medium.
BRISTOL, U.K. Spike Island “Along a Spectrum,” Veronica Ryan’s most ambitious U.K. show to date (on view through September 5, 2021), features a new body of work created during a two-year residency at Spike Island. Viewers entering the light and airy gallery space encounter a beguiling array of forms, many held within sumptuously colored netting in shades of orange, yellow, and lime-green.
