Category: Sculpture

Contemporary Art, Drawing, Sculpture

Tom Sachs at the New School

Lecture notes Feb 11 2026, New School, New York.

1. The Ethos of Making vs. Owning

Sachs argues that ownership is passive, while making is an active spiritual state.

“Drive for making, not for owning”: A critique of consumerism. The value of an object isn’t in its MSRP, but in the labor, repair, and understanding of how it functions.

Tom Sachs speaking at the New School auditorium

Broadway Boogie Woogie: This refers to Piet Mondrian’s 1942-43 painting, which he replicated with gaffer’s tape. Sachs views it as a blueprint for organized chaos. It represents the “grid” of the city—pulsating, rhythmic, and strictly structured yet vibrating with energy. He uses it as a metaphor for his studio’s organization.

2. Bricolage & Gesamtkunstwerk

These are the two bookends of his technical and conceptual approach.

Bricolage (“Everything kind of works”): The art of using whatever is at hand. In a Sachsian world, “perfect” is the enemy of “done.” If a zip-tie and plywood solve the problem, that is the most honest solution. It highlights the “scars” of construction.

Gesamtkunstwerk: A “total work of art.” This is why he doesn’t just make a sculpture; he makes the zine, the film, the uniform, and the ritual ceremony to go with it. Every detail of the environment is considered part of the piece.

3. Layers of Experience & Sympathetic Magic

Space Suit Details: Sachs focuses on things like LCGs (Liquid Cooling Garments). Even if the cooling tubes don’t “work” to NASA standards, the act of sewing them creates a “layer of experience” for the maker and the viewer.

Sympathetic Magic: This is a key Sachs concept. It’s the idea that by building a 1:1 scale model of a Saturn V rocket out of plywood, you are actually “summoning” the power and prestige of the space program. If you build it with enough devotion, it becomes the thing it represents.

The Shoe: His Nike collaborations (like the Mars Yard) are extensions of this. They aren’t “fashion”; they are tools for the “sport” of making.

4. The Studio as a System

“I’m not James Bond, I’m Q”: Bond is the consumer of gadgets; Q is the creator. Sachs identifies with the tinkerer in the basement who enables the mission.

The Sports Team: The studio (131 Varick St) operates under “Ten Bullets” (his code of conduct). Like a team, everyone has a role, a uniform, and a shared goal of excellence through discipline.

5. ISRU & The Daily Ritual

ISRU (In-Situ Resource Utilization): A NASA term for “living off the land” (e.g., making fuel from Martian soil). Sachs applies this to the studio: use what you have, don’t buy new stuff if you can build it.

Output before Input: This is his productivity mantra. Do not check your phone or “consume” (input) in the morning until you have “produced” (output) something—writing, drawing, or building.

Avoid the Phone: The phone is a portal to “other people’s agendas.” Sachs advocates for keeping the morning sacred for your own creative labor.

6. The Archive (Zines and Books)

A Book for Every Project: Documentation is as important as the object. A project isn’t finished until it is “codified” in a zine. This traces back to his high school days—the DIY ethos of punk rock and skate culture where if you didn’t print it, it didn’t happen.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dan Flavin: Grids

Zwirner, New York, January 15—February 21, 2026

Dan Flavin at David Zwirner is often the rare “big-name light show” that is actually about looking, not just bathing in color for the selfies. This one, titled Dan Flavin: Grids, is a tight, historically specific presentation: it focuses on Flavin’s “grid” constructions, a body of work he began in 1976.  Zwirner frames it as the first focused examination of that format.

The gallery’s stated premise is also unusually specific: several installations are “re-creations” of how Flavin installed the grids in significant lifetime exhibitions, with loans from public collections and the Estate. That matters because Flavin’s work is not just “light in a room.” It is light behaving against a particular corner, a particular wall height, a particular ceiling condition. In other words: architecture, but with fluorescent tubes doing the drawing.

Flavin’s grids are a special subset of his practice because they push past the clean one-liner summary of him as the artist of commercially available fluorescent lamps. In the exhibition text, curator Michael Govan is quoted calling the grids “among the most intense and concentrated” of Flavin’s lights. The reason is structural: the grids pair an equal number of vertical fixtures facing backward with horizontal fixtures facing forward, in varying color combinations. You end up with a work that broadcasts outward to you while also pumping color into the corner itself, so the room becomes a mixing chamber.

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Ceramics, Sculpture

A Hidden Oasis in the Bronx

Tucked away on the ground floor of the Walsh Family Library at Fordham’s Rose Hill campus, the Fordham Museum of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman Art is one of New York City’s best-kept secrets. For anyone in the Bronx, it offers a startlingly intimate encounter with the ancient world, particularly the enigmatic Etruscan civilization that predated and influenced the rise of Rome.

Roman bust carved in marble
Fordham's Museum of Etruscan Art
etruscan vase at Fordham
An Etruscan Mosaic

The museum’s location (literally inside a library) creates a quiet atmosphere. Unlike the sprawling halls of the Met, where you might feel like one of many thousands, here you are often the only person in the room with artifacts that are 2,500 years old. Windows look out onto the campus, grounding the ancient objects in a modern academic setting.

Etruscan Highlights

While the collection spans the Mediterranean, its Etruscan holdings are particularly evocative of a culture that blended elegance with a deep focus on the afterlife and ritual.

  • Bucchero Ware: The collection’s standout is its array of Bucchero pottery. This is the signature “black-on-black” ceramic of the Etruscans, designed to mimic more expensive hammered metal. The deep, lustrous black finish and sharp, angular shapes provide a striking contrast to the more common red-and-black figure Greek vases nearby.
  • Votive Offerings: You’ll find a fascinating collection of terracotta votive heads and feet. These were left at temples as “thank you” notes or prayers for healing. They are surprisingly human and individualistic, offering a direct emotional link to the people from the Italian peninsula long before the Caesars.
  • The Burial Amphora: A centerpiece of the renovated gallery is a large Etruscan Amphora (ca. 650 B.C.E.). It serves as a focal point for understanding Etruscan burial ceremonies, surrounded by smaller implements like bronze spearheads and cosmetic applicators.
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists

M+ Museum, Hong Kong, 20 September 2025 to 8 January 2026

From the M+ Museum in West Kowloon, this blockbuster exhibition, Dream Rooms: Environments by Women Artists 1950s–Now, was a massive, shimmering statement that basically told the Hong Kong art scene that women have been building entire worlds for decades. The show takes over several key spaces in the museum, including the West Gallery, Focus Gallery, Atrium, and the Main Hall. Because many of the installations were “environments” (like the Feather Room and Spectral Passage), the show had specific “House Rules” most notably that visitors had to remove their shoes and wear socks to enter the actual artworks.

The Concept: Art You Can Live In

The brilliance of Dream Rooms was perhaps in the scale, but also in the reclaiming of history. For years, “environmental art” (large-scale installations) was seen as a masculine pursuit: heavy materials, industrial grit, “man against nature.” This show proves that women were also the true pioneers of immersive spaces, often using “soft” or ephemeral materials to create even more powerful psychological impact.

The Standouts:

  • Chiharu Shiota’s Infinite Memory: Walking into the Focus Gallery felt like entering a collective dream. Shiota’s signature red thread webs were so dense they felt like architecture. It was a massive, pulsating nervous system that made you feel slightly trapped.
  • Aleksandra Kasuba’s Spectral Passage: This was the show-stopper for anyone who loves color theory. A series of interconnected nylon tunnels that felt like walking through a rainbow. Paired with Gustav Holst’s The Planets, it turned the museum into a futuristic transit hub for the soul.
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Richard Serra: Running Arcs (For John Cage)

Gagosian, New York, September 12 to December 20 2025.

At Gagosian’s West 21st Street space, Running Arcs (For John Cage) returned to public view after more than three decades, its first presentation in the United States. The three monumental, conical steel plates are arranged in a staggered rhythm that bends the room into corridors of weight. Each plate is roughly 52 feet long, 13 feet high, and 2 inches thick. The title nods to Serra’s friendship with Cage and to the way the piece scores movement, tempo, and chance as you pass along its curve. (Gagosian)

The plates do not tower for effect. They lean in and run, turning peripheral vision into an event and making the floor feel like a material in the piece. It is Serra at his most austere. And most cinematic. (Gagosian)

Richard Serra (1938–2024) reshaped late 20th-century sculpture with site-scaled steel works that use mass, balance, and procession to produce experience. Trained in painting before moving to industrial materials, he developed a vocabulary of rolled or forged steel plates and torqued forms, along with a major body of drawings. His long relationship with Gagosian includes landmark installations across the gallery’s New York spaces. (Gagosian)

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Architecture, Sculpture

“A Time to Build” at the Shaker Museum

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.

Shaker museum, A time to build

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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Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Robert Indiana: The American Dream

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

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture, textiles

Ghada Amer: Disobedient Thought

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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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Modern Art, Painting, Sculpture

Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting

Gagosian Gallery, New York, New York
April 15 to July 11, 2025


In spring–summer 2025, Gagosian’s Chelsea space at 555 West 24th Street reopened with “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting,” curated by Cecilia Alemani (High Line Art). The exhibition ran from April 15 and was extended through July 11, 2025.

Although frequently described as “retrospective-like,” it was more accurately a deliberately edited, museum-caliber survey: 24 works spanning 1944–1986, installed across the gallery’s rooms in a way that encouraged viewers to read de Kooning’s career as recursive rather than linear. (The show’s checklist numbers 24 objects, including two bronzes and 22 paintings; this “distillation” was part of its point.)

What made the show feel unusually “retrospective” for a commercial gallery wasn’t only the historical range, but also its curatorial thesis and its institutional muscle. Alemani and Gagosian secured significant museum loans—most prominently MoMA’s “Untitled V” (1982) and the Guggenheim’s “…Whose Name Was Writ in Water” (1975).

The title “Endless Painting” functions as both description and argument. In the supporting materials around the show, the phrase is explicitly linked to de Kooning’s “ever-evolving” pictorial language and to his oft-cited habit of stopping rather than finishing—“just stop”—a stance that frames revision, scraping-back, and perpetual re-beginning as the medium’s true subject.

Alemani’s key curatorial move was to reject a strictly chronological narrative in favor of what she described (in preview coverage) as an exhibition that “skips and jumps” and “creates rhymes” across decades. In practical terms, this meant engineering sightlines and adjacencies that made repetition legible: a 1940s work could “echo” a late ribbon painting; an iconic mid-career figure could be made to reverberate against a near-abstract contour from the 1980s.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Jane Rosen: New Studies

Sears-Peyton Gallery, New York, January 30 to March 8 2025

At Sears-Peyton Gallery (Jan 30–Mar 8, 2025), New Studies distilled Jane Rosen’s lifelong attention to animal presence into spare, lucid objects and drawings. The show paired hand-blown, pigmented-glass “birds” poised on limestone or travertine plinths with sheets of Korean watercolor and gouache. Works that read like field notes pared to essentials. The figures sit in dialogue with their stone bases; on the walls, feathered marks and negative space do the same work at paper scale. The installation made her method plain: subtract until the living line remains.

Born in New York City in 1950, Jane Rosen worked across sculpture and drawing, often marrying blown glass to found or carved stone to consider animal intelligence and our ties to the natural world. After early decades in the New York scene, she relocated to the California coast, teaching widely (including SVA, Stanford, and UC Berkeley) while developing the avian forms that became her signature. Rosen died on April 18, 2025, in Northern California.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Carl Andre

January 9 to February 8, 2025 Paula Cooper Gallery NY, NY

Paula Cooper’s winter presentation of Carl Andre stretched across the gallery’s three West 21st Street spaces, quietly marking a year since the artist’s death and reminding New York how much of our sculptural eyesight he trained. The installation moved with Andre’s usual economy: materials set down, not fussed over; form arising from count and contact.

At 534, three monumental works established the terms. Breda (1986) laid out Belgian blue limestone blocks with the finality of civic paving, while Rise (2011) bent steel plates out from the wall to create a shallow enclosure, half alcove, half barricade. Ferox (1982) pushed hot-rolled steel from a corner in a triangular advance, a reminder that “floor piece” in Andre’s hands can feel like a verb.

The show widened the frame beyond metal and stone. Early collages and Negative Sculpture (1958) in acrylic foregrounded a pre-industrial hand, while typed poems (including gifts to filmmaker Hollis Frampton) made the parallel argument: words, too, can be stacked, aligned, and allowed to simply sit. Across all three sites, the curatorial through-line was generous: matter is enough, if you let it speak

Andre’s art doesn’t explain; it arranges. You carry out the rest, the angle of approach, the pace, the weight. After a circuit through stone, steel, brick, wood, and type, the take-away was almost architectural: planes and modules compose an experience.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Kara Walker: Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)

SF MoMA, San Francisco, July 1 2024 – June 7 2026

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine)
A Respite for the Weary Time-Traveler.
Featuring a Rite of Ancient Intelligence Carried out by The Gardeners
Toward the Continued Improvement of the Human Specious
by
Kara E-Walker

Kara Walker’s Fortuna and the Immortality Garden (Machine) is an intricate, imposing sculptural installation that confronts the viewer with the brutal machinery of empire, myth, and memory. In her signature fusion of historical allegory and visual spectacle, Walker constructs a haunting tableau.

The work centers on Fortuna, the Roman goddess of luck and fate, reimagined through the lens of colonial violence. Mechanical elements suggest both the churn of progress and the dehumanizing gears of oppression — evoking the plantation, the empire, the factory, and the museum all at once. Figures emerge in silhouette or sculptural form, echoing Walker’s earlier cut-paper work but rendered here in three-dimensional space. It is monumental and inescapable.

Fortuna and the Immortality Garden is not a place of peace, but of decay masked as beauty. The “garden” is littered with the wreckage of history, and the “machine” is a self-perpetuating myth engine. It grinds trauma into iconography.

As with much of Walker’s work, the piece invites viewers into complicity: to witness, to feel, and to reckon with the myths they’ve inherited.

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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Diana Al-Hadid: “Women, Bronze, and Dangerous Things

Kasmin Gallery, New York, November 2 – December 22, 2023

A sculpture by Diana Al-Hadid

Al-Hadid is a Brooklyn based artist. Born in Aleppo, Syria, Diana Al-Hadid emigrated to the United States when she was five years old, growing up in Ohio. There she received a BA at Kent State and then went on to earn an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University.

The exhibition work spans a number of media, including rigid board, styrene, bronze, and wax. Commenting on the mythological content of the subject matter, the gallery writes:

“Across Al-Hadid’s use of motifs in this exhibition—which includes figures from Greek mythology alongside protagonists in Islamic and Christian narratives—the artist’s contemporary interpretations intuitively navigate different attempts of reading the future through our past. Constructions in nature such as mountains and caves reappear as emblematic elements of landscape tied to the social, psychological, and religious narratives that have been absorbed into dominant culture over the centuries. Indifferent to where these narratives find their origin in theology, Al-Hadid’s method of retrieving stories both communicate with history and imagine them anew. At once prophetic and autobiographical, Al-Hadid’s sensitive installation across two sites of the gallery’s architecture articulates a realm that manifests, both physically and metaphorically, above ground and below.”

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