Angela de la Cruz’s Turner Prize 2010 nomination stems from her solo exhibition, After at Camden Arts Centre, London. De la Cruz uses the language of painting and sculpture to create striking works that combine formal tension with a deeper emotional presence.
When the Walker Art Center opened its new Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building in 1971, it ushered in exciting new possibilities for exhibiting and collecting the art of its time. The Barnes building, with its sweeping, rectangular galleries and white terrazzo floors, was one of the first U.S. museums designed to showcase sculpture and other works that abandoned the pedestal to be shown directly on the floor, resulting in a more direct relationship between viewer and object.
Sol LeWitt (1928-2007) was one of the first artists whose work graced the Barnes building. LeWitt and the Walker enjoyed a relationship that spanned more than 35 years. It began with the museum’s purchase of sculptures (LeWitt called them “structures”) in the mid-1960s and includes approximately 200 pieces donated by the artist during his lifetime. His work is featured prominently in the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden, and his enduring wall drawings have graced the Walker’s public spaces since the early 1980s.
The exhibition Sol LeWitt: 2D+3D, on view November 18, 2010 (from 5-9 pm)-April 24, 2011, presents for the first time the full range of the Walker’s LeWitt holdings, highlighting the artist’s three-dimensional structures, wall drawings, models, unique works on paper, prints, and artist’s books.
Wall Street is subject of Federico Solmi’s latest satirical swipe at society. Through animation and painting (manipulated digitally) Solmi tackles greed and violence. The exhibition, Douche Bag City, also includes a large scale sculpture from Solmi’s Evil Empire and a collaborative animation with 3D artists Russel Lowe and Lee Gibson.
Conner Contemporary Art is located at 1358 Florida Avenue, NE –Washington, DC 20002, in the historic H Street Corridor/ Florida Avenue.
Now on view at Miami’s Charest Weinberg gallery, Robert Fischer Quarry presents new sculpture by the Brooklyn-based artist.
This description put a smile on my face -
Where we might see a mere roadside attraction with minor rubbernecking appeal, Fischer instantly gleans the potential in every shotgun shack and punctured oil drum as a potent memory trigger for what he describes as a “congregation of ambitions.” That is to say, in repurposing whole taxonomies of quasi-architectural roadkill and then further defamiliarizing them with the recombinant tactics of a prairie bricoleur, Fischer never loses sight of these neglected artifacts as the magnets for human assembly they once were. Though leached of every former trace of the utilitarian and deliriously abstracted into retro-Modern totems, the scuffed floor boards of a scavenged gymnasium floor, to take but one example, always carry the phantasmic traces of the shot-clock running down, the buzzer-beating 3-pointer, the Hail Mary pass, and the crowd’s collective sigh and groan as the applause fades into another season. They always carry, in other words, the human residue from an endless succession of convocations of yearning, absent the cloying Hoosier-like nostalgia that typically clings to cinematic representations of same. The seismographic ups and downs of the dream deferred, and by extension, the beleaguered pioneer optimism that once gave rise to it, is, in essence, the material substrate of Fischer’s work.
On view until November 21, 2010. The gallery is at 250 NW 23rd St, Space 408, Miami FL, 33127.
New York-based Dan Colen has hit Paris with a signature installation in the courtyard of Colette. The jumble of bicycles, delicately balancing thoughts of “junk or sculpture” fills the space well and hits the nail on Colen’s style. His work at Gagosian recently found leaning Harley’s – so you can easily see the connection here. (via LaMJC).
Check out the full scope of the installation after the jump.
Entanglements, opens on October 23, 2010, and will be the first exhibition to present two contemporary artists currently represented by The Proposition – Ben Bunch and Evan Levine – at once. Featured are Levine’s paintings alongside sculptures by Ben Bunch. Both artists employ intense layering and construction, mixing de-construction and re-construction in al blend of color and space.
THE PROPOSITION
2 Extra Place (E 1st Street, off Bowery)
New York, NY 10003
Born in Oxford, Mississippi, Carson Fox has transformed the galleries of Redux into an exaggerated winter wonderland. Through mixed-media installation, she has created works simulating icicles and snowflakes.
The work is on view through November 30, 2010, at Redux Contemporary Art Center in Charleston, South Carolina. Entitled, Ice Storm, the sculptural pieces are produced with complex arrangements of individual pieces of cast resin. The result is a richly textured, highly controlled, vision of winter.
On view through December 3, 2010, at the Visual Arts Center of New Jersey, Cut, Weld, Build: Process in Works by Chakaia Booker. The exhibition explores the range of Booker’s work from the 1990s to the present.
Since the early 1990s, New Jersey-born artist Chakaia Booker has emerged as one of the most notable American artists of her generation. She is especially celebrated for her largely, monumental scale sculptures made of an unconventional artistic material: rubber tires. Booker earned an undergraduate degree in sociology from Rutgers University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from City College of New York. She has had solo exhibitions at the Neuberger Museum of Art, the Akron Art Museum, the Marlborough Gallery, and her work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Arts and the National Museum of Women in the Arts.
Above – It’s So Hard To Be Green, 2000, rubber tire, wood 150 x 252 x 24 inches.
Additional works from Cut, Weld, Build after the jump.
Installed in the window of Bergdorf Goodman, Andy Harman’s “BK Totem” melds pop culture reference, craft, and a vague notion about “future flea-market goers.” Andreas Kokkino wrote about Harman’s latest leather work in T, finding glory in the Yale trained artists investigation of reinvestigation of sculpture through furniture.
Carefully manipulate a stack of ottomans, and one achieves a monumental burger.
Opened over the weekend, Abstract Expressionist New York pulls from MOMA’s vast collections of abstract expressionism – painting, sculpture, video, and more – to explore the achievements of a generation of artists that catapulted New York to center of the art universe in the 1950s.
More than sixty years have passed since the critic Robert Coates, writing in the New Yorker in 1946, first used the term “Abstract Expressionism” to describe the richly colored canvases of Hans Hofmann. Over the years the name has come to designate the paintings and sculptures of artists as different as Jackson Pollock and Barnett Newman, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko, Lee Krasner and David Smith. Beginning in the 1940s, under the aegis of Director Alfred H. Barr, Jr., works by these artists began to enter the Museum’s collection. Thanks to the sustained support of the curators, the trustees, and the artists themselves, these ambitious acquisitions continued throughout the second half of the last century and produced a collection of Abstract Expressionist art of unrivaled breadth and depth.
Conde Nast Traveller has produced a solid review of the exhibition, notable for the brief breakdown of the central ideas behind abstract expressionism. It can be found here.
The exhibition remains on view until April 25, 2011.
