Contemporary Art and Culture
LA based artist Alicia Piller creates multi layered sculptures and installations in which material, media, form, and color metamorphose into alluring environments filled with cultural, political, and biographic references—latex balloons, sycamore seeds, silkscreen images fuse into a cosmos with visually complex and open ended layers of meaning.
Continue reading “Alicia Piller – Weathering Climates”
Irish visual artist and researcher Anna Macleod has spent the last 15 years exploring the environmental, economic, spiritual, political, and scientific aspects of water through interdisciplinary collaborations, performance, public interventions, and socially engaged activism.
Continue reading “Water Conversations, The Goddess Brigid, and Mayflies”
Jimmie Durham, Untitled (detail), 2020- Photo credit Francesco Allegretto, Courtesy of the artist’s estate (6)
Coinciding with the 59th Venice Biennale, the seventh edition of Glasstress, running from 3 of June to 27 of November 2022 in Venice, features a group of leading contemporary artists from Europe, the United States, Latin America and Africa in an ambitious exhibition who explore the infinite creative possibilities of glass. The artworks will be exhibited at the Fondazione Berengo Art Space in Murano, an old abandoned furnace that was transformed into a unique exhibition space a few years ago. This extensive group show, curated by Adriano Berengo and Koen Vanmechelen with the contribution of Ludovico Pratesi, channels diverse contemporary art through the ancient art of Murano glassblowing, aiming to search for new contemporary visual vocabulary in glass art.
Continue reading “GLASSTRESS 2022: State of Mind at Fondazione Berengo Art Space”
UK based artist Helen Twigge-Molecey’s installation at Palazzo Mora in Venice depicts a group of colorful fungi. Each hand-blown recycled glass piece features individual shapes and interconnects with its neighbours through translucency and color. This installation is part of the Venice 2022 Art Biennial organized by the non-profit organization European Cultural Center, running from April 23, 2022 through November 27th, 2022.
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Gut Feeling is a solo exhibition of hyper-tactile sculptures by sculptor, Kate Casanova, at Yi Gallery in Brooklyn. This is Casanova’s first solo show with the gallery. The exhibition will be on view May 14 through July 9.
Continue reading “Kate Casanova: Gut Feeling at Yi Gallery”
Grimo, courtesy of the artist and photographer Adam Reich.
Artist Kristina Libby is no stranger to the power of public art: during the onset of COVID, Libby founded the Floral Heart Project. In collaboration with 1-800-Flowers, The Floral Heart Project created and distributed floral heart wreaths as a tribute to those who lost their lives to COVID-19. Moved by community response to the Floral Heart Project, Libby has created a series of large sculptures of apex animals known as the Chunkos. Greenwich Village, a hot-spot for both art and architecture, will play host to the Chunkos in an immersive exhibition titled In Plain Sight (on view from June 10-12). The exhibit is inspired by the unique history of animals in art and architecture in the neighborhood and is a celebration of the resilience, courage and creativity of New Yorkers from all walks of life. On Friday, June 10th, there will be an interactive public art painting exercise with Libby and the Village Alliance Business Improvement District from 5-7pm. She hopes that the installation of the Chunkos in Astor place will spark new conversations and evoke curiosity from passerbys. Curious artists of all ages are welcome to join as she paints in real time with the help of the community the inaugural animals in her Chunkos series.
Continue reading “Artist Kristina Libby and the Village Alliance Welcome New Animal Inspired Public Art Exhibition – In Plain Sight”
To kick off the Dumbo Open Studios Weekend in late April, Platform Project Space opened MOD, a five person show commanding strong appeal, curated by Sharon Butler. As the title and press release indicate, modularity, modernism and mods, or modifications in contemporary gaming, are all potentially at play both in the individual works and together as an installation. Each artist’s contribution holds a single wall or area in a small room that’s comfortable, easy, and open. The formal language of color and shape is nuanced to suggest personal and organic qualities and intimate spaces. No mystery here. Instead, curiosity openly hovers in close examinations of the human touch, in the detail and care given to small moments.
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I’ll start with a question: does a critic have an obligation to propose a solution to an enigmatic puzzle an exhibition might pose? What has led to this, is reading William Corwin’s catalog essay for The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, in which he ignores recounting the history of sculpture and color—deemed for a very long time to be irreconcilable like fish and cheese. It is now common knowledge, sculpture till the time of the renaissance was largely polychromed, but a neo-classical notion of purity and essentialism came to be imposed upon it to differentiate it qualitatively from painting. As a result, sculpture came to be limited to the colors of its materials—marble, bronze and wood. In the West, this formalism was institutionalized by the Enlightenment’s and was the excepted norm until the mid-20th century, when art’s traditional forms began to morph. Consequently, we must ask if there is a more contemporary issue concerning color and form at the heart of Corwin’s The Agreement: Chromatic Presences, and if so, what might it be?
Continue reading “The Agreement: Chromatic Presences – Funky and Formal at Zurcher”
Susan Rostow’s sculptures resemble archeological artifacts with biomorphic characteristics, inviting us to probe into their origin, meaning and what they are made of. Textures of abrasive material such as clay and moss-like surface, along with graphic symbols such as linear markings of shore tides and other signifiers from old maps, fuse into hybrid forms where the lines between past and future, what is natural and what is fabricated, are seamlessly blurred.
Continue reading “Susan Rostow: Biomorphic Figurations”
Far from the palatial white cubes of Chelsea or the intimate townhouse spaces of the Upper East Side is a different type of gallery space – one that serves as a reminder of an earlier moment in the art world, and yet persists into the present – the SoHo loft. In his debut solo exhibition, Sam Spillman has created work that probes at this history in In Case Of Sam Spillman at Ulterior Gallery.
Continue reading “In Case of Sam Spillman at Ulterior Gallery”