This selection of shows has been curated by Sculpture magazine editorial staff and includes just a few of the great shows around the world.
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Brooklyn Bridge Park -
Brooklyn, New York:
Anish Kapoor
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| Through September 10, 2017 |
Kapoor's geometric and biomorphic
objects seem to come from another
world, a realm of almost impossible
purity, lightness, and beauty. But
there has always been a tension in
his work that undermines harmonic
perfection: roughness intrudes on
refinement; messy internal implications
qualify austere voids; and
made matter threatens to dissolve
into the unmade. Descension, one
of his more unusual and viscerally
arresting works, harnesses the most
evanescent of materials to explore
the depths of transformative substance.
Set against the linear flow
of the East River, this massive, centrifugal
funnel of water appears to
breach the earth's surface, drilling a
vortex of negative space down into
the ground. It may be a perceptual
trick, achieved with nothing more
than black dye, but the sense of
wonder is real, if not awe-inspiring.
Such a manifestation of the void is
perhaps as close as we can come to
the liminal, uncanny chasms that,
according to the ancient Greeks,
formed passageways leading to the
infinite and the divine.
Web site
www.publicartfund.org
Anish Kapoor, Descension |
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GEM Museum for Contemporary Art -
The Hague:
Folkert de Jong
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| Through August 20, 2017
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de Jong takes a bleak view of human
life and its prospects. Seemingly
on the verge of decomposition, his
grotesquely expressive figures
resemble the walking dead, their
brittle flesh rendered in Styrofoam
and polyurethane washed with
acidic color. These materials, like
the human body itself, are not
meant to be eternal; nor are they
environmentally friendly. Their toxicity
is precisely the point, underscoring
the dark themes of violence,
greed, and power enacted in his
tableaux, which combine ironic references
to art history with contemporary
concerns. "Weird Science"
returns to his earlier investigation
into the transitory nature of ideals,
focusing on the internecine
squabbling that poisoned De Stijl's
utopian aspirations (or revealed
them for what they were). With
besmirched bodies and grimacing
faces, effigies of Mondrian, van
Doesburg, Oud, and Rietveld (set
within a multimedia installation
produced in collaboration with the
artist collective YAE) pay ambivalent
tribute to the group's much-touted
revolutionary idealism, while questioning
the motivations of art when
it dabbles in social engineering.
de Jong may seem a strange choice
to celebrate the 100th anniversary
of De Stijl, but his tendency to corrupt
timelessness with decay while
revealing the compulsions that
drive freedom make him the perfect
corrective to Modernism's political
naiveté and grandiose theoretical
pretensions.
Web site
http://www.gem-online.nl
Folkert de Jong, studio view of
"Weird Science" in progress |
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Henie Onstad Kunstsenter -
Høvikodden, Norway:
Carsten Höller
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| Through September 10, 2017 |
Höller considers his works as experiments
and viewers as his subjects,
upending assumptions about perception,
sensory experience, balance,
and time. Ranging from the
purely conceptual to the elaborately
architectural, his installations challenge
human behavior, question
logic, and offer altered states of
mind and body. Not content to let
viewers look on from the sidelines,
he invites active physical partici -
pation in his constructions, which
include spatial inversions, flying
machines, and confounding passages.
Visitors checking into his
"Henie Onstad Sanatorium" can
float, slide, and fly their way through
a series of sculptural treatment
regimens, even booking private
overnight sessions and accommodation
in Two Roaming Beds. Delving
into considerations of safety, childhood,
love, happiness, and the
future, Höller's physical and psychological
analysis reveals how certainty
never endures, life requires
endless negotiations with unfamiliar
terrain, and any decisions we make lie "somewhere between delight
and madness."
Web site
http://hok.no
Carsten Höller, Two Roaming Beds
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Institute of Contemporary Art -
Boston:
Nari Ward
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| Through September 4, 2017 |
A master of the found object, Ward
revives otherwise spent detritus, giving
decay an afterlife as art. Moved
by an almost religious sentiment, his
objects-many collected from neighborhoods
where he's lived and
worked-evince an animistic conception
of debris, projecting primal
yearnings, emotions, and fears.
Though this miracle of rehabilitation
is performed by narrative, Ward's
tales are far from simple: stories told
and untold, real and imagined, intertwine
in new configurations that fuse
forgotten personal and spiritual
echoes with new, politically charged
messages. "Sun Splashed," his midcareer
survey, features installations,
sculptures, and films that mix and
match the iconic, the obscure, and
the popular into conceptually evocative
conflations of normative definition
and free-ranging interpretation.
(Six new outdoor commissions are
also on view at Socrates Sculpture
Park through September 4.) Resuscitating
the past in order to excavate
the present-its codes, behaviors,
stereotypes-Ward replaces accepted
certainties and established contexts
with unknown, even makeshift possibilities,
giving viewers the agency to
draw their own conclusions.
Web site
http://www.icaboston.org
Nari Ward, Radha LiquorSoul
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Kunsthaus Bregenz -
Bregenz, Austria:
Adrián Villar Rojas
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| Through August 27, 2017 |
Best known for site-specific, often
monumental works in unfired
clay, integrated with moss and fruit,
sneakers, cutlery, and computer
parts, Villar Rojas describes his practice
as organic. He builds worlds
we have never seen, places we have
never been. An idea, channeled via
discussions and collaborations, grows
into a piece, an exhibition, an inclusive
performance. Everything is part
of the work, from concept and experiment
to production and final deterioration-
all of it set in motion by
time, which acts as catalyst and dir -
ector, staging a drama that moves
inevitably toward a radical ending.
"Theater of Disappearance," his spectacular
new show, traces the full
extent of what could be called his
primary obsession-the trajectory
of human culture. In this surreal and
apocalyptic history lesson, origins
evolve into questionable apotheosis,
as viewers follow the stations of
artistic achievement from Lascaux
through Piero and Michelangelo to
Picasso. Within this time-lapse chronicle,
rare objects in metamorphosis
give way to blind alleys, both spatial
and ideological. An exploration of
memory, Villar Rojas's anti-museum
becomes a recording device that
displays the experience of making
the "remains of art."
Web site
http://www.kunsthaus-bregenz.at
Adrián Villar Rojas, Rinascimento
(detail)
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Kunsthaus Graz -
Graz, Austria:
Erwin Wurm
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| Through August 20, 2017 |
Every time Wurm produces a sculpture
from a real object-cars, potatoes,
cucumbers, pieces of clothing-
he creates something strange and
wonderful. Embracing the absurd, his
work invites us to consider different
possibilities for the ordinary and
familiar. Experiments in performance,
photography, installation, drawing,
video, and text add another
dimension, pushing the boundaries
of sculpture by investigating time,
mass, and material form. An artist
so devoted to notions of rule-breaking,
individuality, and personal freedom
would bridle at the idea of a
retrospective, and so Wurm gives us
"Football-size clump of clay on a light
blue car roof." The next step in his
radically expanded notion of sculpture,
the show features a group of
new works that connect the performative,
the participatory, and the
sculptural with each other and with
their surroundings-most disconcertingly
in the form of "word sculptures."
As always, Wurm finds a pervasive
weirdness lurking just beneath
the surface of accepted conventions,
or in this case, on top of the ped -
estal, where he has placed speaking
protagonists. These living sculptures
address each viewer directly,
describing possible scenarios for
the show's title in order to implant
a mental image that takes shape
as a virtual, and unique, "one-minute
sculpture" existing only in the individual
imagination.
Web site
http://www.museum-joanneum.at/de/kunsthaus
Erwin
Wurm, installation view of "Footballsize
clump of clay on a light blue car
roof".
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Museum of Contemporary Art -
Chicago:
Tania Pérez Córdova
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| Through August 20, 2017 |
In Pérez Córdova's work, forms
become memories, objects grow into
experiences, and sculptures turn into
events. She inscribes her seemingly
static pieces with hints of an active
life, teasing out moments in implied
social and economic relationships.
Odd juxtapositions embrace the ordinary
world of daily transactions with
other people and systems, though we
only see a part. A single gold earring
hangs from a bronze cast, an active
credit card slots into a wood-fired clay
platter, and a SIM card embedded in
a terra-cotta slab signals missed calls.
Each work embodies a network of
negotiations between the artist and
third parties-the woman left with
only one earring, the credit card user,
the bank, and the whole credit system.
Stand-ins for each and every one
of us, and our place in digital communication,
these "contemporary relics,"
act as clues to the everyday lives of
others and to our culture as a whole-
everyone tied into, and bound
together by, far-reaching impersonal
mechanisms that mold the personal
and generate community.
Web site http://www.mcachicago.org
Tania Pérez Córdova, Person
A / Person B
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National Gallery of Art -
Washington, DC:
Theaster Gates
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| Through September 4, 2017 |
Gates made his reputation with the
artistic and social rejuvenation of his
South Chicago neighborhood. Architectural
displacements between
Chicago and cities around the world
reinforced his efforts, symbolically
mending one damaged cultural history
with another. An interventionist
and activist, he never seemed to fit
the contemporary art marketplace, so
it wasn't surprising when he hinted
that he might leave art to focus on
"practicing life." He didn't. Now, backed
by two blue-chip galleries, he seems
to be gaming the game, smuggling
willfully unseen life and labor into the
ivory tower. Inspired by a decorative
arts slide collection and his experience
roofing with his father, the large-scale
assemblages in "The Minor Arts" speak
two languages-one of ordinary
skilled craft and one of fine art genius,
linked together by their offspring,
sculpture. These resonant artifacts,
"modern castoffs," as Gates calls
them-including a gym floor from a
closed school, a reconstructed slate
roof turned into a monolithic wall, an
archive of Ebony magazines (rebound
by a master bookbinder), and salvaged
stone from a deconsecrated
church-stand not only for themselves,
but also for the impoverishment
of today's urban world. Craftsmanship
and the trade arts-indeed,
hand-work in general-have lost
all meaning and value, while building
materials have themselves been
dumbed down, reduced to the cheapest
(and ugliest) common denominator.
More than just structures, the
demolished buildings mined by Gates
once supported communities-they
may not have been architecturally
significant, but they embodied pride
and identity. Touched with bronze,
overlaid with painted geometric
grids-graced, in other words, by the
aura of canonistic Modernism-these
rescued fragments in translation may
accomplish what the loss of countless
neighborhoods could not, touching
people who have never had to watch
their world crumble.
Web site
http://www.nga.gov
Theaster Gates, installation
view of "The Minor Arts"
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New Museum -
New York:
Elaine Cameron-Weir
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| Through September 3, 2017 |
Cameron-Weir's sculptures engage
various design aesthetics, bringing
together modern, industrial, and natural
to call attention to phenomena
both manifest and hidden. Inspired
by 19th-century aesthetes-
paragons of highly refined sensitivity-
she updates their pursuit
of heightened sensory engagement,
transgressive sexual desire, and pleasure
through artifice and illusion.
Artifacts and associations dredged up
from the past hold the same allure
for her, romanticized and gothicized
into lurid, titillating evocations. In
"viscera has questions about itself,"
typical laboratory implements-
metal barrels, rods, clamps-would
suggest nothing more than scientific
observation and inquiry if not for
their resemblance to medieval armor,
torture devices, and early Renaissance
orthopedics, which sit uneasily
with hanging bits of fleshy matter.
Like Mary Shelley, Cameron-Weir
probes the tissues that connect ration -
alism and fantasy, looking for aberrations
that defy scientific explanation
and outlets for human hubris.
Forget artificial intelligence and
machine rebellion, the implications here are potentially more unsettling.
Since we already know that some
types of knowledge belong solely to
the body, why shouldn't we test biological
systems for intelligence and
self-awareness? Would the practical
or ethical impulse win? And if body
parts could be proven to think independently
of the brain, would that
tip the scales of mind/body duality,
redefining what it means to be a
thinking animal?
Web site
http://www.newmuseum.org
Elaine Cameron-Weir, Metaphor |
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Nottingham Contemporary -
Nottingham, U.K:
Lara Favaretto
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| Through August 28, 2017 |
Favaretto likes to shift "from perfection
to the fall, to push the work
to its tipping point, its limit, to endanger
it, to the point of making it yield,
jam, collapse." Investigating the monumentality
and mutability of sculpture,
she tests its relationship to time,
using failure, futility, and disappearance
as generative processes. In this
exploration of uncertainty, the
artwork becomes a relic, a remnant
of events long over and forgotten.
"Absolutely Nothing" features works
from the past 20 years, including Bulk
(2002), 14 enigmatic plaster casts
of carnival masks worn in an artistled
procession, Relic (2015), nine
concrete sculptures cast from part of
Favaretto's 400-ton scrap metal project
for Documenta 13, and a new
public commission-Thinking Head
(2017). Inspired by Alighiero e Boetti's
final sculpture, the electrically heated
self-portrait My Brain is Smoking
(1993), Favaretto expands the idea
of mental overheating to an entire
building, as clouds of steam rising
from the roof create a changing display
of form and pattern. Designed
to reflect the intensity of the energy
inside, the visible emanations of this
"thinking machine" only tell half the
story-the other, subterranean half
remains out of sight. If and when
Favaretto decides to release the hidden
details, we might learn just
who is controlling whom in this living
experiment with group think.
Web site
http://www.nottinghamcontemporary.org
Lara Favaretto, 7724–7716 |
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Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian
American Art Museum -
Washington, DC:
Peter Voulkos
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| Through August 20, 2017 |
 Arguably the most radical figure in
the history of ceramics, Voulkos broke
every rule in the potter's handbook,
rejecting orthodoxies of proper technique,
form, and function (though
not before mastering them all). For
15 years (1953–68)-the "Breakthrough
Years" of this exhibition-he
engaged in a crash course of experimentation,
tearing apart and rebuilding
everything he knew, violently
attacking the vessel, breaking down
its parts, and reconfiguring them into
a new visual language that fundamentally
changed the status of clay
as an artistic material. By the time he
arrived at his iconic "Stacks," ceramic
sculpture could just be sculpture,
without the qualifier. So many of the
qualities that we value today regardless
of medium-formlessness, inelegance,
improvisation; the misshapen,
the accidental, the failed-can all be
traced back to his championing of the
potentialities of clay over static perfection.
The 31 pieces here, including
three wonderful, rarely seen
paintings, pursue myriad directions,
demonstrating a searching mind
working at speed, creating and
destroying in the same gesture. This
fearless approach to making is
Voulkos's true legacy, and his most
significant heirs (ironically enough
considering his cultish machismo) are
artists like Arlene Shechet and Lynda
Benglis, to name just two, sculptors
who are willing to cross boundaries
and disciplines, who discover vital
forms through physical and intellectual
intimacy with materials.
Web site
http://americanart.si.edu
Peter Voulkos, Annon
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San Diego Museum of Art -
San Diego:
Richard Deacon
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| Through September 4, 2017 |
Deacon, a self-described "fabricator,"
neither carves nor models; instead,
he constructs, using manufacturing
and building techniques. For more
than 40 years, he has created unique
sculptures in a wide variety of materials,
from laminated wood, polycarbonate,
and paper to leather, cloth,
and ceramic. Realized at both domestic
and monumental scales, his structures combine biomorphic forms
with elements of engineering, hiding
none of the technical processes
behind their realization. The sculptures
are defined as much by the
space within and around them as
their innovative, dynamically interactive
shapes. His aptly titled retrospective,
"What You See Is What You
Get," features 40 three-dimensional
works from across three decades,
including the new Under the Weather
no. 1 (the first in a projected series),
all pursuing the motion inherent
in life forms.
Web site
http://www.sdmart.org
Richard Deacon, Under the
Weather no. 1 |
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Yorkshire Sculpture Park -
West Bretton, Wakefield, U.K:
Tony Cragg
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| Through September 3, 2017 |
A "radical materialist," Cragg defines
sculpture as a "rare category of
objects." The individual elements that
make up his compositions are important,
but his process depends on
whether and how those elements
can be developed and transformed
into a whole larger than the sum of
its parts. A scientific, almost "manic,"
interest in the potential movement
of bodies drives him to search
for, study, and reveal all the possible
mutations of a primary structure.
Executed in a variety of materials, his
shape-shifting sculptures reject the
idea of closed form in favor of "openings."
This indoor and outdoor show,
his largest U.K. exhibition to date,
features works in glass, bronze, steel,
plastic, wood, and stone from Cragg's
nearly five-decade career, as well as
new sculptures. From his radical plastic
stacks of the '70s through the
Micro/Macrostructures, Organs and
Organisms, Vessels and Cells, and
Early Forms to Rational Beings, his
works reveal a physical approach to
spirituality-a commitment to form
as ideas made manifest, that offers,
as Cragg says, "an alternative to looking
at nature and an alternative to
looking at a dull-headed industrial,
utilitarian reality."
Web site
http://www.ysp.co.uk
Tony Cragg, Caldera |
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