London-based Olivia Bax makes brightly colored sculptures whose tactile, handmade aesthetic derives from the pulp and papier-mâché that she uses to cover steel, chicken wire, and foam armatures.
September/October 2021
September/October 2021
Absorbing Stories: A Conversation with Kris Lemsalu
Kris Lemsalu’s work explores the mysteries, wonders, and absurdities of birth, life, and death. Like artists past, she considers these themes (the stuff of art since the beginning of human time) and poses the same existential question: What’s it all about?
The Object Looks Back: A Conversation with David Altmejd
Employing an invented language of the human form that re-articulates heads, hands, ears, limbs, and sexual organs, David Altmejd’s figures present an assemblage of dispersed parts that give the impression of a body shattering and shuddering into being.
Truer Forms: A Conversation with Yasue Maetake
The Wind, 2016–19. Forged steel, cast polyester resin, resin-coated soil on Plexiglas, and drawing on found plywood, 90 x 113 x 106 in. Photo: Courtesy the artist. Yasue Maetake, a Japanese sculptor who has been living in New York for more than 10 years, creates small to life-size works with found materials, blending abstract and
Object Lessons: Maya Lin
I knew I wanted to create something for Madison Square Park that would be intimately related to the park itself, the trees, and the state of the earth. Throughout the world, climate change is causing vast tracts of forested lands to die off.
Liz Magor
VANCOUVER Catriona Jeffries Liz Magor’s dramatic installations encapsulate the chaos of our times, piecing together puzzles in which everyday objects enact confounding and disturbing narratives. Born in Winnipeg, Magor has resided in Vancouver most of her life. She speaks fondly of her Vancouver childhood, recalling its seaside harbor as a “wild, cranky, beautiful type of place,” which might also describe the bewitching mix of the beauteous and the abject in her work.
Jennifer Wen Ma
NEW BRITAIN, CONNECTICUT New Britain Museum of American Art Viewers first absorb Jennifer Wen Ma’s An Inward Sea (on view through October 24, 2021) as a lyrical, room-filling composition of waves set under a full moon. But that initial response quickly shifts, as synchronized sound and mechanized elements intensify with charged momentum.
Mutable Bodies: A Conversation with Bonnie Collura
For more than 20 years, Bonnie Collura has pursued a sculptural agenda that incorporates wildly diverse materials and processes while also drawing on a wide array of references—everything from the pop cultural worlds of cartoons and movies like Star Wars to highbrow texts such as Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
Peeled From a Private Life: Tracey Emin’s New Bronzes
Tracey Emin shot to fame when My Bed (1998) was shown at London’s Tate Gallery in 1999 as one of the shortlisted works for the Turner Prize. The sheets marked with bodily secretions, the used condoms, and the menstrual-stained underwear sent critics into an uproar, and a media furor ensued.
Igshaan Adams
LONDON Hayward Gallery In the hands of Igshaan Adams, a sculpture is in endless evolution. As the South African artist explained during the opening of his current exhibition (on view through July 25, 2021), “My sculptures are a never-ending work. I add materials in different moments, and leave them aside in the studio for years at times because with my sculptures there is no intention or agenda. It is about trying out new ideas.”
