Lari Pittman, Thanksgiving, 1985, oil and synthetic polymer on wood, 80 x 82 1/8".

“Lari Pittman: A Decorated Chronology”

CONTEMPORARY ART MUSEUM ST. LOUIS
SAINT LOUIS
Through August 11
Curated by Kelly Shindler

Lari Pittman’s paintings are notoriously difficult to describe. Intricate layers of foreground and background combined with a dazzling array of mark-making (spray painting, sign painting, precise curlicues applied like spun sugar, and the list goes on) defy single-point perspective, monocular camera vision, and abstraction. Pittman shows us what the world looks like when hierarchy is banished and everything is equal. It’s no coincidence that looking at his paintings feels like being in a car—objects in the mirror are closer than they appear, a moving landscape perpetually framed behind glass; this is democracy via Los Angeles, and it’s troubling, beautiful, and fantastic. CAM St. Louis’s modest survey (comprising thirty works from the mid-1980s to the present) and its catalogue with an essay by Shindler (and a reprint of my own 2011 interview with Pittman) promise to kick-start a nationwide reckoning with one of our greatest living artists.

— Helen Molesworth

Abraham Cruzvillegas, Aeropuerto Alterno, 2002, mixed media, dimensions variable.

“Abraham Cruzvillegas: The Autoconstrucción Suites”

WALKER ART CENTER
MINNEAPOLIS
Through September 22
Curated by Clara Kim

Born and raised in Mexico, Abraham Cruzvillegas has a close familiarity with autoconstrucciónes—communally constructed environments characterized by formal inventiveness with limited means—and they have inspired much of his work. In this urban context, poetic and ephemeral actions often come from a place of DIY-spirited social resistance, as statements against the false privileges of monumentality. Fittingly, then, some of Cruzvillegas’s strongest works have been fragile assemblages and simple, chance-based actions, such as those he created (and left undocumented) for Documenta 13. This major solo exhibition and its catalogue promise to offer an exhaustive survey of the past two decades of this artist’s work—an ambitious undertaking of a sort that has curiously (or sadly?) not yet been essayed in the artist’s native country.

— Sofía Hernández Chong Cuy

Paul Sietsema, Chinese Philosophy Painting, 2012, enamel on canvas, 26 1/2 x 18 1/2".

Paul Sietsema

WEXNER CENTER FOR THE ARTS
COLUMBUS, OH
Through August 4
Curated by Christopher Bedford

Paul Sietsema is best known for his slow and sumptuous 16-mm films, though his complex practice extends to other media. If he carefully constructs his films as meditations on original and copy, in his works on paper the LA-based artist takes mimesis to an extreme, rendering them all but indistinguishable from old photographs or paint-splattered newsprint. Via convoluted replication processes and incredible handwork, Sietsema’s excavations of material culture present things that are not as they seem, pinning fiction against truth, the now against historical fact. The artist’s first major US survey will include five of his films along with more than forty drawings, collages, and paintings, all of which will be examined in the catalogue containing essays by art historians George Baker and Suzanne Hudson and a new interview with the artist by Bill Horrigan and Bedford.

Travels to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Sept. 7, 2013–Jan. 5, 2014.

— Elena Filipovic

Karla Black

ICA - INSTITUTE OF CONTEMPORARY ART, PHILADELPHIA
PHILADELPHIA
Through July 28
Curated by Kate Kraczon

Experimenting with the fragility of materials such as cellophane, powder, lipstick, and eye shadow, Karla Black creates visceral sculptures that convey vulnerability and uncertainty yet remain stalwartly poised on the verge of something extraordinary. The Glasgow-based artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the US will consist of a massive, site-specific work, Practically in Shadow, 2013. Black’s largest hanging polyethylene form to date will be suspended from the ICA’s thirty-foot ceiling and bathed in natural light from the surrounding skylights. On the floor below, nearly seven thousand pounds of powdered plaster and paint will be arranged under a crown-like cellophane covering. Chalk dust, Sellotape, thread, bath bombs, and nail polish, all in pastel shades, will complete the palette. The tensions between these materials—of density and lightness, formlessness and structure—will surely strike the dramatic balance for which Black’s compositions are so well known.

— Lauren Dyer Amazeen

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Mum & Dad, 1971, mixed media, 11 x 15".

“Genesis Breyer P-Orridge: S/He Is Her/E”

THE ANDY WARHOL MUSEUM
PITTSBURGH
Through September 15
Curated by Nicholas Chambers

Though best known as the vocalist and guiding force behind the seminal industrial music groups Throbbing Gristle and Psychic TV, Genesis P-Orridge first emerged as a body/performance artist in early-1970s London, leading the highly controversial multimedia collective COUM Transmissions. In the ’90s, P-Orridge took up another radical body art collaboration, together with the late Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge, in their Pandrogyne project, which took gender-bending and William Burroughs/Brion Gysin’s notions of the “third mind” and the cut-up method to aesthetic and biological extremes. This first solo museum exhibition dedicated to P-Orridge, including more than one hundred works dating from the early ’70s to the present, will emphasize the Pandrogyne collaboration but will also include silk screens, sculptures, photographs, and collages, along with relics from COUM Transmissions’s too-often neglected contributions to performance art’s outer limits.

— Alan Licht

Wangechi Mutu, Riding Death in My Sleep, 2002, ink collage on paper, 60 x 44”.

“Wangechi Mutu: A Fantastic Journey”

NASHER MUSEUM OF ART AT DUKE UNIVERSITY
DURHAM, NC
Through July 21
Curated by Trevor Schoonmaker

Nairobi-born, Brooklyn-based artist Wangechi Mutu has spent the past decade-plus proving that collage— modernism’s foundational medium—still has plenty of space left for innovation through her depictions of cyborg-femme figures in various states of seduction, distension, and distress. This first major solo museum exhibition and catalogue (with essays by the curator, dream hampton, Mutu, Kristine Stiles, and Greg Tate) will survey the artist’s contributions to ideas of transnational feminism, Afro-Futurism, and globalization in collage, sculpture, drawing, performance, and video, from the mid- 1990s to the present. Bringing together roughly forty works, the show will feature previously unseen sketchbooks, a new video animation made with pop producer and singer Santigold, and site-specific installations that will bring the collages’ lush wooded landscapes to immersive life.

— Thomas J. Lax