Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago Illinois, Apr 20–Aug 11, 2024
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Yayoi Kusama, “I Spend Each Day Embracing Flowers”
David Zwirner Gallery, New York, May 11 – Friday, July 21, 2023
Yayoi Kusama is one of Japanese Pop-Art’s leading lights, combining monumental works with a minimal, feminist, and conceptual blend of sculpture and painting. Her signature gesture is a field of dots, in the case of this show applied to monumental abstracted squash / biomorphic shapes. The effects range from bland to transcendent.
The New York Times comments on her instagram-perfect immersive scenarios:
“It’s a beautiful effect. (Or it was for me, alone in the room; you’ll be sharing the experience with up to three other visitors at a time.) But you needn’t be Dr. Freud to diagnose that the narcissism of a new selfie-devoted public has canceled, utterly, the goals of self-obliteration that Ms. Kusama intends her infinite installations to achieve. The self cannot dissolve when the selfie is the goal.”
Picasso: 14 Sketchbooks, 1900-1959
Pace Gallery, New York, November 10 – December 23, 2023
A fascinating show of Picasso’s sketchbooks ranging through his career at Pace.
From the Gallery’s site:
Organized in collaboration with the Fundación Almine y Bernard Ruiz-Picasso, Madrid (FABA)—with whom our gallery has maintained a longstanding relationship—this exhibition of Picasso’s sketchbooks will offer a unique and intimate view of the ways in which the artist worked, tracing the evolution of his observations and ideas into plans for his compositions across painting and sculpture.
Mark di Suvero “Nova Albion”
Paula Cooper Gallery, New York, May 1-July 31 2010
The exhibition presents Nova Albion, 1964-1965, a monumental 24-feet high sculpture made of steel and redwood logs. Nova Albion is named after the white cliffs of northern California that were seen by Captain Francis Drake on June 17, 1579. The California beaches Drake explored are the same ones where di Suvero built this piece using found drift wood logs. In the title, Nova refers to a star that suddenly becomes a thousand times brighter and then gradually fades to its original intensity, and Albion refers to the earliest known name for England.
-Paula Cooper Gallery