This selection of shows has been curated by Sculpture magazine editorial staff and includes just a few of the great shows around the world.
Aldrich Contemporary Art
Museum -
Ridgefield, Connecticut:
Jessi Reaves
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Through January 13, 2019 |
Reaves's sculptures impersonate
functional domestic objects--sofas,
chairs, ottomans, tables, bookcases,
lamps, cabinets, and coat racks--
imaginatively deconstructing existing
designs and envisioning new prototypes.
Unlikely unions of materials,
including steel, driftwood, sawdust,
zippers, plywood, wearable fabrics,
and car fenders, endow these
charismatic, almost anthropomorphic
forms with a range of formal
temperaments, from the shapely
and sensuous to the misshapen,
dissected, and contorted. Riffing on
well-known modern design masters,
such as Charles and Ray Eames,
Noguchi, and Sottsass, Reaves goes
a step further, rejecting mid-century
polish in favor of an eccentric craftsmanship
rooted in process and a
sculptural/conceptual approach to
function. In "Kitchen Arrangement,"
she reinterprets the everyday and
aspirational necessities that define
the (stereotypically feminine) heart
of the home, destabilizing homogeneous,
mass-market expectations of
seating, cabinetry, appliances, and
lighting.
Web site www.aldrichart.org
Jessi Reaves,
installation view of "Kitchen Arrangement." |
Frist Center for the Visual Arts -
Nashville:
Do Ho Suh
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Through January 6, 2019
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Suh's installations blend the monumental
and the transient to capture
the emotional tensions of displacement:
belonging while being alien,
being home while longing for
"home." His architectural sculptures
start "from a reflection on space,
especially personal space--not only
a physical one, but an intangible,
metaphorical, and psychological
one." That identification of self with
place infuses not only the spaces
we call home, but also the details--
those objects and bits of hardware
that we handle daily. Closely
observed fabric renditions of sinks,
toilets, latch sets, and hinges,
removed from their context, isolated,
and displayed as "Specimens,"
elevate ordinary items into uncanny
familiars, emphasizing their intimate
contact with the life around them.
Suh's objects may record the specificities
of his life, but their nostalgic
resonance is universal. Rendered in
gossamer jewel tones, these ghostly
doppelgängers stitch together the
self as memory. They also add up to
a conceptual salvage yard, paying
homage to the character of place
beyond the self, recording buildings,
ornaments, and artifacts that will
soon dissolve into the past.
Web site www.fristcenter.org
Do Ho Suh, Basin, Apartment
A, 348 West 22nd Street, New York,
NY 10011, USA.
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MSU Broad -
East Lansing, Michigan:
David Lamelas
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Through January 6, 2019 |
A pioneer of conceptual art and a
key member of the Argentinean
avant-garde during the 1960s, Lamelas
believes that artworks have their
own consciousness, with an
extended life beyond their creation
and initial site of presentation--they
exist, in other words, as ideas that
evolve and adapt to different conditions.
"Fiction of a Production"
focuses on sculptures and site-specific
works that analyze and deconstruct
architectural space, blurring
the lines between art and architecture
and repositioning sculpture as
a relationship between space, place,
and time. From early sculptures created
in the 1960s through reconstructions
adapted to respond to the
Broad's Zaha Hadid-designed building,
the works in this show all reveal
the activity of their making, engaging
time as a sculptural material.
Web site broadmuseum.msu.edu
David Lamelas,
Untitled (Falling Wall).
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El Museo del Barrio -
New York:
Liliana Porter
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Through January 27, 2019 |
Porter's sometimes unsettling
images and installations explore the
conflicting boundaries between fact
and fiction, blending metaphysical
Surrealism with the magic realism
of Lewis Carroll, Franz Kafka, and
Jorge Luis Borges. Her spatial "situations,"
which may be realized as
stagings, photographs, or films, bring
together a pantheon of little characters--
Elvis Presley, Che Guevara,
Jesus, Mickey and Minnie Mouse,
Pinocchio, Alice, toy soldiers, piggy
banks, rubber ducks, and Benito
Juárez--in sardonic confrontations
that turn the lightweight aesthetic
of kitsch into an expression of philosophical
heft. "Other Situations,"
her first New York museum show in
more than 25 years, features works
created from 1973 to 2018, including
examples from the recent "Forced
Labor" series in which ordinary
figurines make radical statements
about contemporary conditions. Set
against nondescript, infinite backdrops,
Porter's flea-market artifacts
engage in alternately urgent, absurd,
and futile activities without beginning
or end. Second-hand versions
of Sisyphus, they are forever doomed
to enact the stupidities of life in
a culture that can't distinguish substance
from spectacle, importance
from irrelevance.
Web site www.elmuseo.org
Liliana Porter, Forced Labor
(Sweeping Woman).
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Museum of Contemporary Art -
Denver:
Tara Donovan
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Through January 27, 2019 |
Donovan bases each of her phenomenologically
charged installations
on the physical properties and
structural capabilities of a single
accumulated everyday material.
In a leap from the mundane to the
miraculous, she responds to the texture,
density, mass, and size of everything
from electrical cables, paper
plates, straws, and straight pins to
roofing felt, index cards, and toothpicks,
building large quantities of
individual components into distinctive
forms. Layered, twisted, piled,
or clustered with almost viral repetition,
her work grows via processes
that mimic those of the natural
world while seeming to defy the laws
of nature. "Fieldwork," which brings
together works from the last 20
years, demonstrates how repetitive
labor, order, and structure can lead
to the unpredictable and the aweinspiring.
Web site mcadenver.org
Tara Donovan, Untitled (Mylar).
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National Gallery of Art -
Washington, DC:
Rachel Whiteread
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Through January 13, 2019 |
Whiteread has spent almost 30 years
cataloguing an inverse inventory of
human life and relations, casting the
space within and around objects. Set
in plaster, resin, concrete, and
rubber, her negative impressions of
cupboards, tables, bathtubs, wash
basins, beds, mattresses, stairways,
rooms, and entire houses record the
gaps between bodies and space--
simultaneously material and immaterial,
they function like spirit sculptures,
capturing emanations and
memories invisible to the naked eye.
In addition to intimate domestic
sculptures, monumental casts, and
works on paper (which Whiteread
thinks of as "a diary"), the NGA
version of this touring show features
a special section devoted to the
restoration of Ghost (her first architectural
scale work) and the history
of its original, new cast-paper works
made from piles of shredded personal
documents, and choice selections
from her remarkable collection
of treasures rescued from the streets
of London.
Web site www.nga.gov
Rachel
Whiteread, Ghost, Ghost II.
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New Museum -
New York:
Sarah Lucas
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Through January 20, 2019 |
Lucas's provocative sculptures exalt
in coarse visual puns, common vulgarities,
and a defiant, bawdy humor.
Created from an idiosyncratic mix of
everyday materials, including worn
furniture, clothing, pantyhose, fruit
and vegetables, newspapers, cigarettes,
cars, resin, plaster, and light
fittings, their grungy, sometimes
haphazard appearance only reinforces
a serious and complex subject
matter. Lucas makes sculpture
of and from the human body--
a time-bound, decaying object that
requires maintenance and care--
and her quasi-narrative scenarios
question gender definitions and
defy macho culture. As she puts it,
"With only minor adjustments, a
provocative image can become confrontational,
converted from an
offer of sexual service into a castration
image." "Au Naturel," her first
American survey exhibition, features
more than 150 works--30 years
worth of blatant, naked truths. These
surreal hybrids and fragments
emphasize how far our representations
of sexuality and gender have
progressed, and how far they
haven't, challenging artistic as well
as social proprieties in pursuit of a
more equitable balance in human
relations.
Web site www.newmuseum.org
Sarah Lucas, Me Bar Stool.
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Whitechapel Gallery -
London:
Elmgreen & Dragset
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Through January 13, 2019 |
A collaborative team since 1995,
Elmgreen & Dragset use their installations,
performances, and largescale
environments (particularly the
"Powerless Structures") to challenge
architectural and social norms,
revealing the mechanisms of ideological
control behind even the simplest
arrangements of walls, ceilings,
entrances, and exits. "This Is How
We Bite Our Tongue" combines a
survey of their emotionally astute
figurative sculptures with a new
commission that foregoes the surreal
terrain of so many of their largescale
stagings in favor of grim reality.
Devoid of water, with grimy tiles
and peeling plaster, The Whitechapel
Pool--complete with a fictional
backstory that charts its rise during
a time of philanthropic public-mindedness
and subsequent fall under
today's politically sanctioned austerity--
offers a heartfelt protest
against the gentrification of London's
East End (just one casualty of the
selfish impulse shaping cities today).
Private, or semi-private, is the new
public: genuinely free and open
spaces, whether libraries, recreation
centers, or parks, are quickly becoming
extinct. Deliberately starved
by neglect, these last bastions of the
commons are edging toward the fate
of Elmgreen & Dragset's Pool:
reduced to a historic afterthought
in a luxury spa hotel.
Web site
www.whitechapelgallery.org
Elmgreen & Dragset, The
Whitechapel Pool.
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