Anthony James uses math and science to explore concepts of the infinite in his Portal sculptures. One of them, 80″ Great Rhombicosidodecahedron, 2020, pictured above, is currently on view at Palm Springs Art Museum.
Dec 132024
Dec 122024
The above work is Olafur Eliasson’s Edgy but perfect kinship sphere, 2020, spotted at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery’s Los Angeles location.
Eliasson is showing work in a solo exhibition at the gallery’s New York location that includes two new light installations, one of which includes sound, a series of recent watercolors, and two new sculptures. That exhibition will be on view until 12/19/24.
In Los Angeles he has a solo exhibition at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, on view until July 2025. This show is part of the PST ART: Art and Science Collide programming taking place throughout Southern California.
Jul 252024
Canton Museum of Art’s Spring/Summer Exhibitions include three artists who have created engaging new worlds for visitors to explore.
Ginny Ruffner’s sculptures hide colorful surprises in her exhibition Reforestation of the Imagination. Working with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, they have created digitally animated fictional plants that burst from the certain sections of the works when using their app on your phone (the museum will also loan you a tablet if you need one). Ruffner has also provided delightful descriptions for these creations, as well as her drawings.
From the museum-
Imagine an apocalyptic landscape. It appears barren, devastated, and hopeless. It is not.
In this traveling exhibition from the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, internationally renowned artist Ginny Ruffner creates a seemingly bleak environment that suddenly evolves into a thriving floral oasis by combining traditional sculpture with augmented reality (AR) technology. In collaboration with animator and media artist Grant Kirkpatrick, Ruffner brings to life a colorful world where glass stumps suddenly sprout mythical flora that have adapted to their surrounding conditions in unexpected, beautiful and optimistic ways. By transforming the CMA lower galleries into a multidimensional experience, Ginny Ruffner: Reforestation of the Imagination calls into question the very notions of reality and fantasy, of concrete and abstract, and of desolation and hope.
Ginny Ruffner is among a vibrant group of artists bringing AR to museum installations. By using this technology as another art media, she transforms visitor experiences. The installation consists of landmasses featuring intricate handblown glass sculptures of tree stumps, with painted tree rings that function as discrete QR codes. These islands surround a landmass that supports a large fiberglass stump sprouting beautifully grotesque bronze and glass appendages. Other than the central stump and the painted shelf mushrooms and tree rings on the surrounding stumps, the scene appears colorless and desolate; however, when viewed through AR’s technological lens an alternate landscape is revealed.
Visitors can download the free app “Reforestation” on their phones or use the iPads in the gallery to bring this second reality to life. When the tree rings of a stump are viewed through the device’s camera lens, a hologram of a fictional plant appears to sprout from the sculpture. These imagined fruits and flowers have evolved from existing flora, developing dramatic appendages and skills necessary to flourish in this radically different environment. In this reality, tulips develop stem flexibility, pears contain windows to the outside world and flowers take on the form of birds. The installation includes Ruffner’s tongue-in-cheek descriptions of her fanciful flora and their remarkable, sometimes humorous adaptations, as well as 19 original drawings by the artist that were the inspiration for the AR images.
“This is nature reimagining itself,” said Ruffner. “The imagination cannot be exterminated. It just re-creates itself. To me, ‘Reforestation’ is about hope.”
The intricate porcelain works Janice Jakielski created for her exhibition Impossible Objects are reminiscent of papercut art. Through her unique ceramic process (detailed in the Ceramics Monthly article linked below) the delicate work takes traditional objects and presents them in new and intriguing ways.
From the museum-
Janice Jakielski is a Massachusetts (soon to be Colorado) based sculptor. By inventing new ways of casting and manipulating ultra-thin porcelain sheets she can create impossible objects of curiosity, beautiful objects to provide focus, retreat and pause in an overwhelming world. Using meticulous detail, familiar forms and uncertain function she coaxes her audience to draw near, closing the physical gap between viewer and object. In this way the details of workmanship and the excessive fragility of the porcelain act as a whisper, flirtatiously demanding investigation. Her impossible objects were also featured in the January 2021 issue of Ceramics Monthly.
For Laine Bachman’s paintings for Beyond Worlds, she has created detailed environments filled with creatures and color.
From the museum and the artist-
“Suspended in the ether of some surreal galaxy, the worlds I create give a glimpse into flora and fauna that exist in a hidden interplanetary realm. Each is a themed bouquet where I explore and study different species that exist in our own world. I relish the details of their structures and include many forms of life I find fascinating. I approach each piece as a puzzle with parts that can coexist, painting a picture of a precious ecosystem that becomes more complex as the work evolves. One may find a frog nestled below a fern or a mole napping under a toadstool. There are many creatures and plants we recognize from the past and some that have yet to be discovered. Creating these planets has been a journey to capture the beauty of nature and elevate small moments that may otherwise go unseen. Though they reside in the mire of a newly formed galaxy, they are truly a celebration of our world and the life that exists within it.”- Laine Bachman
As a young child growing up in a once flourishing town in the Rust Belt of Ohio, Laine Bachman always had an affinity towards drawing and painting. Her parents encouraged her creativity from the beginning which led to her attending art school in nearby Columbus, receiving a BFA from the Columbus College of Art and Design in painting in 1997.
Often inspired by myths and folklore, Bachman infuses the worlds she creates with archetypal imagery, underlying themes, decorative motifs, and meticulous details. Working in watercolor and acrylics, her paintings are full of creatures and landscapes, real or imagined, that are all part of the larger story behind her work. Bachman’s work, recognized as Magical Realism, is greatly influenced by Henri Rosseau and his flat, lush, and detailed landscapes and also by surrealist Frida Kahlo.
Representations of life, death, beauty, innocence, and evil are depicted in Bachman’s work. Whether it’s animals, insects, birds or favored objects, they become symbols of different expressions. As owls are a symbol for wisdom or butterflies can represent a transformation, it’s this kind of idea behind the creatures that helps them tell a part of the whole story.
The works expose unique environments in which to explore and pay homage to the various forms of life that Bachman finds fascinating and mysterious in nature. Vast landscapes are used to showcase these life forms, showing the spaces between and the surfaces above and below. The worlds she creates are hidden and untouched by man, and give the viewer a glimpse into the secret lives of their peculiar inhabitants.
These exhibitions close 7/28/24.
The museum is free all day on Thursdays and tonight, 7/25, is the last of their Virtual Reality Nights. From 4-8pm you can create your own reality with VR headsets, guided by a CMA educator.
Jun 212024
“Claw Foot”, 2024, steel, glass, rubber
“Throughline”, 2024, steel, glass
“Twofold”, 2024, steel, rubber
“Tail End”, 2024, steel, glass, concrete
“Slipper”, 2024, concrete, glass, human hair
There’s something very visceral about Martha Friedman’s sculptures for Divided Subject at Broadway Gallery. The body parts, the strange juxtapositions, and the metal rods which act like skewers, combine to form works that balance humor with something darker and aggressive.
From the gallery-
The Lacanian reference of the show’s title is a tip-off that the artist will continue her ongoing psychoanalysis of Modernist sculpture traditions. Wielding humor and violence in equal measure, Friedman homes in on art historical givens with a critical eye.
A series of monumental steel skewers form the spines of these loosely figural works. Slotted with outsized hunks of meat and sliced vegetables cast in glass, and cast-rubber body parts made from molds of her muscular dancer muse Silas Reiner, Friedman marshals our collective appetites in a sendup of Minimalism. By reanimating and anthropomorphizing modes of staid Formalism, the sculptures disrupt accepted meaning and expectation via processes that are as complex and precise as they are absurdly grotesque.
Elsewhere, in some smaller works, we see cast cement limbs coated in luxuriant graphite and fitted with found footwear and exotic cast-glass foods such as geoduck clams, like a Robert Gober at the farmer’s market. These pieces are sometimes situated on artist-designed stands evoking anthropological museum display and engineered to accommodate their weight and precarious balance.
As a whole, the complex variety of materials and technique, as well as dramatic shifts in scale across the exhibition, destabilize the viewer placing them at a crossroads of technical precision and the bluntly visceral. Just as the sculpted figure in art history is a metaphorical container for meaning, Friedman’s pierced flesh reminds us that the body itself is, in fact, held fast by a delicate, porous membrane.
This exhibition closes 6/22/24.
Sep 292023
Christina Bothwell, “Spirit Animal”, 2014, Cast glass, ceramic, oil paint
Christina Bothwell and Robert Bender “Cloud Pillow”, 2016, Cast glass, ceramic, oil paint
Karen LaMonte, “Etude 11”, Cast glass
Leah Wingfield and Steve Clements, “Low Winter Sun, Shadow III”, 2016, Cast glass
K. William LeQuier, “Synergy 2”, 2017, Cut and sandblasted glass
Above are some of the amazing glass works from a 2021 visit to Imagine Museum in St. Pete, Florida. For more work by artists Christina Bothwell, Robert Bender, Karen LaMonte, Leah Wingfield, Steve Clements, and K. William LeQuier, head to the links in this post.
This weekend (9/30 and 10/1) you can visit the museum for $5 (normally $15).
Jun 042023
Wave Piece, 2021, by Kristin McIver, was part of the group show (Barely) Tempered: Concepts in Tension at Jane Lombard Gallery.
Apr 252023
It’s the last week to see the Gerhard Richter exhibition at David Zwirner. The show includes a group of Richter’s last paintings from 2016-17, two of which are pictured above, as well as a new glass sculpture and recent works on paper.
From the press release-
Celebrated worldwide as one of the most important artists of his generation, with a career spanning from the 1960s to the present, Richter has pursued a diverse and influential practice characterized by a decades-long commitment to painting and its formal and conceptual possibilities. The artist has consistently probed the relationship between painting and photography, engaging a variety of styles and innovative techniques in a complex repositioning of genres. In Richter’s work, dual modes of representation and abstraction fundamentally question the way in which we relate to images.
The exhibition will bring together a significant group of Richter’s last oil paintings, made in 2016–2017, a number of which will be shown in New York for the first time. Richter stopped making oil paintings in 2017, and the final work on canvas he made will be on view in the exhibition. Part of the artist’s Abstrakte Bilder (Abstract Paintings) series—a cornerstone of his practice since the 1970s—the works on view exemplify Richter’s investigations into chance occurrences and the painted medium’s historical and material properties. With their highly worked and intricately stratified surfaces, the last paintings foreground the sheer physical presence of paint and color, enacting a mode of composition that is aleatory yet deliberately planned.
Centrally featured will be 3 Scheiben (3 Panes) (2023), a new glass sculpture that continues Richter’s exploration of human perception and the built environment. Comprising three sequential rectangular panes of transparent yet reflective glass—each one positioned upright and measuring almost ten feet in height—the installation invites viewers to look at, through, and beyond its surface, revealing the inherently subjective and situational nature of perceived reality. Richter has consistently created glass and mirrored works since 1967, often presenting them alongside his paintings and drawings and placing them in the larger context of their surrounding architecture. Crucially, while sculptural, these free-standing glass works are also positioned as a literal reflection on painting and image-making; they respond to the art-historical notion of the painting as both a mirror and a window, while also acting as a powerful corollary to the blurred effect of Richter’s photo paintings, which the artist began experimenting with in the 1960s. As critic Hal Foster notes, “The felt analogy between a composed painting and a contemplative viewer is so fundamental that we are not aware of it until it is interfered with. And this is precisely what the glass pieces do: our reflection, in the sense of our mirrored image, disrupts our reflection, in the sense of our contemplation.”1
An expansive suite of new works on paper from 2021–2022—some made with ink and others with graphite and colored pencil—will also be on view. Richter’s drawings constitute a significant element of his practice, allowing him to explore another aspect of the role of the artist’s hand in the creation of a dynamic and abstract pictorial narrative. Many of these works feature passages of cloudy graphite rubbings juxtaposed with equally hazy semi-erased portions. The artist embeds a sparse network of crisscrossing arcs and lines amongst this backdrop, forming an enigmatic topography that seems to map out the very possibilities of image-making itself. Other drawings on view are composed of abstract monochrome washes of ink and graphite, taking on a decisively painterly appearance; as Richter describes, these works on paper chart out a parallel but complementary path to his painted oeuvre, much like that of “a poem and a novel by the same author.”2
Also on view will be mood, a group of inkjet prints that relate to a recent series of colored ink drawings by Richter, both of which debuted at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2022. Part of the artist’s extensive career-long experiments with the iterative translation and interplay of mediums, these vibrant prints are almost indistinguishable from their ink counterparts, revealing Richter’s continued fascination with the possibilities of image reproduction.
This exhibition closes 4/29/23.