Month: May 2025

“A Time to Build” at the Shaker Museum

May 31, 2025

Shaker Museum, Kinderhook, New York opened May 31 2025

Shaker Design and the Art of Removal

Walking through the Shaker Museum’s pop-up exhibition in Kinderhook, A Time to Build, I kept returning to a sculptural idea that sits underneath the familiar story we tell about Shaker “minimalism.” We tend to describe Shaker design as spare, disciplined, and unornamented…a kind of pre-modern Minimalism. But the deeper common ground is actually its method. Shaker craft is, again and again, subtractive sculpture.

In subtractive sculpture, or generally subtractive fabrication, the object starts with a mass in excess of the final result. Whether the object is a block, a beam, a plank, a thick door stile, its first state contains more material than the finished thing requires. It’s an obvious fact, but important enough to be stated clearly. The work, then: ongoing decisions about what to remove, what to spare, and what must stay intact for the object to hold together. Subtractive sculpture is a very different logic than additive sculpture (clay, wax, assemblage, collage), where form accrues through buildup, revision, layering, and so forth. With subtractive fabrication, the object becomes what’s left. The object is a remainder.

In the exhibit’s tool case, the story is told bluntly. The curved-handled hewing tool and the broad hatchet aren’t “about” decoration; they’re about transforming raw stock into legible planes. The plumb bob, dangling with its string, is companion to the blade: the plumb bob makes sure the subtraction lines up with gravity. The bush hammer is a device for texturing or dressing a surface by controlled removal. Put together, these implements revolve around a vocabulary of subtracting. The tools here are designed to make material smaller, truer, flatter, tighter.

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Uncategorized

Anindita Dutta: Performance Piece

May 20, 2025

Pen and Brush, New York, May 20, 2026

Anindita Dutta is an Indian-born, US-based sculptor, installation artist, and performance artist whose practice is materially anchored in wet clay and, increasingly, in the collision between clay and repurposed everyday matter (textiles, clothing, domestic remnants). Her work treats the body as a site of pressure: memory, mortality, and impermanence made literal through the thick clay that cracks, slumps, dries, and records her imprint.

Her most legible “signature” is the way she uses clay as both medium and metaphor. Clay lets her keep process visible: surfaces read as worked and worried. In performance-related work, the body and clay often blur into one another. Clay carries its own behavior, and Dutta leans into it rather than hiding it.

A mildly skeptical read, and I think it is fair, is that work like this can tip into seduction by material density. When it’s strongest, the material excess is in service of a specific psychic or bodily proposition, not just “look how much the surface can hold.” The better pieces tend to be the ones where she maintains a clear hierarchy: sensation first, symbolism second, then spectacle.

Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

May 9, 2025

Pace, New York, May 9 to August 15, 2025

Pace Gallery’s Robert Indiana: The American Dream pulls the artist’s signage, numerology, and road-worn Americana together into a single argument: Indiana didn’t just brand LOVE; he built a whole visual grammar for the country that taught him its alphabet on billboards and gasoline pumps. The show gathers early hard-edge paintings, later meditations on highways and coinage, and the sculptural ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers).

If Indiana’s paintings read like dispatches from postwar America, the Cor-Ten numbers slow the message to a rust-blooming hum. Each numeral stands alone and can be re-sequenced to generate fresh alignments of time, memory, and fate. He often described the sequence as a life cycle: 1 as birth, 0 as death, with the intervening digits walking us through youth, prime, and autumn.

Indiana, a self-described “American painter of signs,” doesn’t illustrate the Dream so much as surface its infrastructure: the numerals we assign to ages and exits; the slogans that sell us gasoline and belonging; the hard edges of policy that decide who merges and who waits. Pace’s framing stresses that double register. Personal history braided with public language, make the show as much about how a country talks to itself as about one artist’s lexicon.

Pace includes canonical examples but the show’s real satisfaction is how the numbers re-center Indiana’s project. He builds a ledger for American aspiration, where desire reads as typography and consequence arrives as arithmetic. It is a quiet reminder that how we arrange our symbols is how we arrange our lives

Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

William Kentridge: A Natural History of the Studio

May 1, 2025

Hauser and Wirth, New York, 1 May to 1 August, 2025

The show’s organizing idea is disarmingly simple and, for Kentridge, unusually literal: the studio as a thinking machine. Kentridge has described the studio as “an enlarged head,” a place where the world comes in, gets broken into fragments, and returns as drawing, performance, or text. (Hauser & Wirth) That statement can read like artist talk boilerplate until you are in the installation, where the “head” is not metaphorical but procedural. The show was built around his episodic film “Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot,” and then surrounded the viewer with the working material that makes that film possible: drawings, paper fragments, revisions, and sculptural props that feel as if they have wandered out of rehearsal. (IFPDA)

The exhibition is not a greatest-hits survey. Instead of treating film, drawing, and sculpture as parallel lanes, it shows their cross-contamination. The film’s premise, a self-portrait displaced onto a domestic object, lets Kentridge do what he does best: think in public. The coffee pot is comic, but it is also a constraint, a way to keep autobiography from turning sentimental. That emphasis on apparatus is why the show feels closer to a studio visit than to a polished museum narrative. (The World Of Interiors)

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture, textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

May 1, 2025

Marianne Boesky, New York, May 1 to June 14, 2025

Ghada Amer’s exhibition Disobedient Thoughts at Marianne Boesky Gallery in Chelsea, presented in spring 2025, offered a lucid and forceful summation of her long-standing project: to unsettle the hierarchies that separate abstraction from figuration, craft from high modernism, and private desire from public form. Installed across the gallery’s West 24th Street space, the show combined large-scale embroidered paintings with a suite of compact sculptures.

The paintings announce Amer’s method through contradiction. From a distance, several canvases read as exercises in modernist discipline, such as grids, nested squares, vertical bands. These recall canonical figures such as Mondrian or Albers. Up close, however, these structures are disrupted by cascades of hand-embroidered thread that slip, knot, and pool across the surface. The thread, often attached with gel medium, refuses the crisp authority of paint. It sags and tangles, asserting gravity and the unmistakable presence of the artist’s hand. Amer’s signature strategy, overlaying abstract order with unruly materiality, here feels less oppositional than accumulative.

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