Tag: Contemporary Art

Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Tomás Saraceno: Radio Alchemist

Tanya Bonakdar, New York. April 14 to June 9 2018

I just walked out of the Bonakdar space and I feel like I need to recalibrate my inner ear. Walking into a Saraceno show is less like visiting a gallery and more like stepping into a high-tech observatory run by spiders.

The “Hybrid Webs”

The downstairs gallery is dark, dominated by these haunting, backlit vitrines. Inside them aren’t sculptures in the traditional sense, but “Hybrid Webs.” The result is this ghostly, architectural lace that looks like a 3D map of the early universe. It’s fragile, terrifying, and beautiful. There’s something deeply humbling about realizing that a tiny invertebrate has a better grasp of structural engineering than most humans.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Looking back at this entry eight years later, Saraceno feels even more prophetic. In 2018, his talk of “interspecies collaboration” felt like a poetic metaphor. Today, as we navigate the complexities of ecological collapse and AI-driven systems, his idea that we need to listen to the “vibrations” of other forms of life feels less like art and more like a survival manual.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Kim McCarty: New Work

Morgan Lehman Gallery, New York, October 26 to December 9, 2017.

Kim McCarty’s new watercolors are, as always, a masterclass in the “uncontrolled” controlled.

Her process involves working on wet paper, which gives her figures (mostly adolescents and botanical forms) this ghostly, translucent quality where the edges seem to be dissolving even as you look at them. There’s a specific kind of tension in these works; because the paint bleeds so freely, every mark feels like a gamble. In this new series, her palette remains muted. Washes of sepia, dusty rose, and bruised blues. These heighten the sense of vulnerability in her subjects. The figures aren’t just portraits; they are meditations on the instability of youth and the body. They feel less like solid things and more like memories that haven’t quite finished fading. It’s a beautiful, fragile show that reminds you how much power there is in the medium.

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Drawing, Modern Art, Sculpture

Ruth Asawa: The Weightless Line

David Zwirner, New York, Sept 13 to October 21, 2017.

I’ve spent the afternoon in a forest made of wire.

Ruth Asawa wire sculpture
Ruth Asawa wire sculpture
Ruth Asawa wire sculpture
Ruth Asawa wire sculpture
Ruth Asawa wire sculpture

Asawa’s signature hanging sculptures, those translucent, biomorphic lobes that seem to defy gravity. They don’t feel like “sculpture” in the traditional sense; they feel like drawings that decided to stand up.

The Geometry of a Shadow

The most mesmerizing thing isn’t just the wire itself, but the shadows they cast on the white gallery walls. Because the works are looped and nested, the shadows become secondary artworks. They look like cellular structures or ghosts of the pieces themselves.

Asawa once said she wanted to “enclose space without blocking it out,” and seeing these in person, you realize she achieved exactly that. They are there, but they are also empty.

Beyond the Wire

While the “baskets” get all the glory, the smaller room with her works on paper is also a revelation. I spent a long time looking at a piece made entirely from a “BMC” laundry stamp from her days at Black Mountain College. It’s a simple, repetitive mark that creates this undulating, textile-like pattern. You can see the DNA of her sculptures right there on the page, the obsession with the “economy of line” she learned from Josef Albers.

Notebook Thoughts:

  • The Vibe: Surprisingly intimate for such a high-profile gallery. It felt like a “mini-museum” show.
  • Key Takeaway: You don’t need to be loud to be powerful. These wires are thin, but they hold the entire room.

2026 Retrospective Note:

It’s wild to look back at this 2017 entry and remember how “new” this felt to the New York establishment. In 2017, this was David Zwirner’s first show after taking over her estate. It was a formal “re-introduction” of Asawa to the canon.

Fast forward to today, 2026, and Asawa is no longer an “overlooked” artist; she’s a cornerstone of 20th-century modernism. We’ve seen the massive MoMA retrospective now, and at SFMoMA and her prices have skyrocketed, but I still think back to this specific afternoon at Zwirner. It was the moment the art world finally stopped calling her a “craftsperson” and started calling her a master.

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Contemporary Art, Painting

Kara Walker: The Most Astounding and Important Painting Show?

Sikkema Jenkins and Co, New York Sept 8 to Oct 21 2017

I walked into Sikkema Jenkins today expecting the usual sharp, clean edges of Kara Walker’s silhouettes, but what I found was something much more raw and chaotic.

The title of the show is a mouthful of 19th-century carnival barker bravado, but the work inside feels like a visceral rejection of the “blockbuster” expectations placed on her. Instead of paper cut-outs, the walls are covered in massive, gestural works using Sumi ink, oil stick, and collage on paper and linen. Pieces like U.S.A. Idioms and Christ’s Entry into Journalism are teeming with a kind of frantic, ink-splattered energy. Crowded scenes of protest, violence, and historical ghosts that feel like they were exorcised onto the page. There is a specific kind of “tiredness” mentioned in the press release (a fatigue with being a “role model” or a “voice”) and you can feel that weight in the brushstrokes. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and brilliant because it refuses to be polite or easily consumable. It’s like reading someone’s most private, feverish late-night sketches, only magnified to a monumental scale.

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting

David Hockney: A Retrospective

Centre Pompidou, Paris. 21 June to 23 October 2017

The David Hockney retrospective in 2017 was a global event, but seeing it at the Pompidou—with its industrial “inside-out” architecture contrasting against Hockney’s saturated, sun-drenched canvases—was a singular experience. It was a celebration of his 80th birthday and an example of how an artist can stay relentlessly modern.

The Pools and the Portraits

The show is massive… over 160 works… and seeing the “canonical” Hockney pieces in person is a reminder of why they became icons in the first place. A Bigger Splash (1967) is much more technical than you’d think; the way he painted the water spray with tiny, deliberate brushes makes the “instant” moment feel like it took a lifetime to capture.

But it’s the double portraits that stopped me. Mr and Mrs Clark and Percy is haunting in person. There is a specific kind of stillness in those 1970s paintings, a domestic tension that is both incredibly chic and also unnerving.

The Technophile

The most surprising part of the show is the final rooms. Most artists “slow down” or get traditional as they hit their 70s and 80s. Hockney did the opposite. Seeing a wall of iPad drawings, luminous, neon-bright landscapes of Yorkshire, proves he is more obsessed with the now than artists half his age.

He’s spent sixty years asking the same question: How do we actually see the world? Whether he’s using a Polaroid camera, a fax machine, or a tablet, the answer is always the same: with total, unadulterated joy.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Reading this back, I realize that 2017 was a pivot point. We thought that was the “final” retrospective, but Hockney just kept going. He spent the pandemic in Normandy painting the arrival of spring on his iPad, and those works have since become their own chapter in art history.

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Fashion

Rei Kawakubo / Comme de Garçons “The Art of the In-Between”

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, May 4 to September 4 2017

This show was a total departure from the Met’s usual costume exhibits. it felt less like a fashion retrospective and more like a trip to a high-concept laboratory on another planet.

She show was a shock to the system. No chronological timelines and, most strikingly, no glass barriers and zero wall text to explain what I was looking at. Instead, the space was a stark, fluorescent-lit landscape of white geometric “pods” (circles, squares, and cylinders) that housed Kawakubo’s radical silhouettes. The clothes themselves are defiant; they ignore the human body entirely, adding “lumps and bumps” in places nature never intended (the 1997 Body Meets Dress, Dress Meets Body collection is even more jarring in person). Because there were no labels to lean on, I found myself looking at the volume of the red nylon and the architecture of the shredded lace rather than thinking about “fashion.” The “In-Between” refers to the space between clothes and art, subject and object. Kawakubo designs for ideas that just happen to be worn by people.

2026 Retrospective Note:

Looking back, this 2017 show was the moment the “Met Gala” era truly collided with high-concept avant-garde art. It remains one of the few times a living designer has been given that kind of space at the Met, and it’s clear why.

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