Tag: Sculpture

Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

Anish Kapoor

Lisson Gallery, New York, New York, November 2 â€“ December 16, 2023

Okay let’s get to the paintings first, because… they are so, so BAD. Poorly drawn, acid combinations of colors that frankly would probably not be exhibited without considering the artist’s established reputation as a sculptor. Many painters and sculptors that cross over into the other’s discipline fail to make powerful works in the alternative medium and that’s okay, they can be interesting failures. And every once in a while, an artist can pull it off (Sara Sze comes to mind since she was recently exhibited in this very room).

On a brighter note the sculptures are intriguing as objects. This is the first exhibit of Anish Kapoor’s trademark gimmick, the Vanta Black pigment that approximates absolute black. The spatial effect of light dying into a form is quite interesting. One work is a rough pile of the stuff heaped on the floor, and the mounds of form and contour can only be seen as silhouette. As you walk around the piece you see that it must have misshapen lumps here and there but they can only see them as a perimeter outline – the light does not reflect back to allow you to perceive any other spatial depth looking into the form itself.

The effect works almost as well in the other pieces, which are simpler form and have different formal interests in absorbing the ambient light. They are interesting, but seemingly one liners and these pieces might not be anywhere near the heights of great art. I can’t imagine, for instance, the idea of their having an influence on another generation of artists. They feel like a dead end.

Such is the power of these miserable paintings that they affect my evaluation of the more familiar sculptures presented here – maybe this is unfair but it’s hard to swim hanging on to an anchor. I try to only review exhibits that I like, and so why include this one? As I said the Vanta Black creates an interesting object, and it’s worth considering. There is perhaps a difference between an interesting object and a worthy work of art, and if it weren’t for the paintings I would consider that.

Anish Kapoor was born in 1954 in Mumbai, India, and works in London and Venice. He currently is exhibiting the show “Untrue Unreal” in the Palazzo Strozzi, in Florence.

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Sculpture

Early Hand Tools and Farm Implements

Columbia County Historical Society, Kinderhook, New York

This exhibit of early hand tools and farm tools at the Columbia County Historical Society in Kinderhook argues for the expressive beauty of these objects. They are obviously handmade and made singly — the asymmetries are fascinating and add life to the pieces.

They share an additional point in common – they are objects to amplify the force of a farmer’s abilities, extending his or her reach, power, ability to grasp or cut. As such, they feel uncanny, almost as if imbued with their own force. I wonder what happens in the museum at night when it is empty and the lights are out.

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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Ann Hamilton: As After Is Before

T Space, Rhinebeck, New York, July 16 to October 1 2023

I met Ann Hamilton in 1998 when she installed her piece “Myein” at the Venice Biennale (I was working to install the Philip Johnson exhibition at the Ca’ Zenobio). Was delighted to see her again here at her work exhibited at Steven Holl’s T Space room.

This piece is an installation of wool coats and sheep fleece, as aromatic as it was beautiful

Inscribed on a stone near the coats are her words:

as outside is to inside
as animal is to human
as stone is to words
as sound is to song
as image is to object
as made is to grown

-Hamilton
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Contemporary Art, Sculpture

Tanel Veenre: BeforeAfter

Ornamentum, Hudson New York. June 24 – July 16, 2023

Tanel Veenre is an Estonian artist focusing on jewelry and wearables that he crafts from wooden organ pipe components, reconfigured into sculptural form. According to wikipedia he is a “jewelry artist,” an awkward phrase trying to describe the in-betweenness of his work. This show at Ornamentum in Hudson mixes elements of craft, jewelry, art, and even a bit of musicianship — apparently the pipes all still produce tone if you blow through them.

He comes from a family of artists and musicians, and if I have the story correctly these pieces are reconfigurations of a wooden organ that his father gave him as a gift.

I am pleased with Veenre’s choices to forgo emphasizing or fetishizing the joinery of the pieces, which is a notorious tempation when working with wood. Instead, the pipe components are reworked with collisional butt-joints and moments of hinging. The effect gives a feel of accidental form and beauty.

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Contemporary Art, Painting, Sculpture

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.”

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Contemporary Art, Drawing, Painting, Sculpture

“Bodies, Bodies, Bodies: Raffish Vulnerability and Profane Ambivalence”

Pen + Brush, New York, June 15 to August 26 2023

Suzanne Unrein “The Animals Are Dancing” 2020
Alfa Ros Petursdottir, “Women’s Parliament” 2023
Heather Goodwind, “Veiled Eye, Right” 2013

“‘Bodies’ represents the authentic and earnest ways in which these artists buck convention so thoroughly that the final product appears unabashed, even crude. The body is literally what binds us, yet here, and contemporarily, it also separates us as we inevitably react to this public and radical display. This show forces viewers to reckon with their own perspectives, values, boundaries, and biases” -Curator Parker Daley Garcia.

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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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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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