print December 2019

Jannis Kounellis and Felix Schramm

A distinct theatricalization of the everyday links the practices of Jannis Kounellis and Felix Schramm, two longtime friends who were once teacher and student. Although the late Greek Italian artist had a penchant for heavy materials, while the German artist is more attentive to lightness and play, their practices meet on philosophical grounds, as this dual exhibition demonstrated. Kounellis was represented by three moments in his artistic arc: a pre–Arte Povera painting, a 1979 print made at San Francisco’s legendary Crown Point Press, and two assemblages that display the affective material

print January 2019

Mario Merz

HOW DO WE RECONCILE our own desires with those of others? Mario Merz (1925–2003) persistently used his art to probe the counterpoint between individuals and society that is at the heart of modern democracy. The Italian artist’s decades-long engagement with constructions that simultaneously recall shelters and the globe is the clearest manifestation of this concern. Since last fall, more than thirty of what Merz called his “igloos” have been assembled in the cavernous industrial space of Milan’s Pirelli Hangar Bicocca. On a scale never achieved in his lifetime, this installation maps his vision

previews January 2019

“LUCIO FONTANA: ON THE THRESHOLD”

Curated by Iria Candela

The Argentinean-Italian artist Lucio Fontana was nearly sixty when he made the first of his “Tagli” (Cuts), 1958–68, the slashed monochrome canvases with which he is now indelibly associated. This sweeping New York retrospective will put those late paintings in context, reminding viewers that Fontana’s concept of “Spatialism” was fundamentally multidisciplinary. Installed at both Met locations and accompanied by an illustrated catalogue, the show will explore an artistic career that spanned four decades, two continents, six manifestos, and media as diverse as stone, metal,

previews September 2018

“MARIO MERZ: IGLOOS”

Between 1968 and 2003, Italian artist Mario Merz built scores of igloos from materials such as glass, clay, sand, iron, sticks, stones, and fabric. That none were made of ice indicates that he wished to explore the construction as a model for anthropological space rather than as a cultural practice. Simultaneously domus and dome—home and archetype—the igloos perform the precarious relationship between individuals and society that informs the artist’s oeuvre. While Merz was fabricating his first igloo, international interest in nonpedigreed architecture was emerging as

print March 2018

Lucio Fontana

The slashed and punctured canvases in Lucio Fontana’s series “Tagli”(Cuts), 1958–68, and “Buchi”(Holes), 1949–68, are often characterized as extreme forms of midcentury modernism’s gestural impulses, or as embodiments of the postwar era’s lingering social turmoil. Both interpretations may be valid, but the Italian-Argentinean artist’s desecration of the picture plane may in fact be best understood in the context of his immersive “Ambienti spaziali” (Spatial Environments), 1948–68. This exhibition, curated by Marina Pugliese, Barbara Ferriani, and Vicente Todolí, presented careful reconstructions

print February 2018

Gilberto Zorio

NEITHER AN ARTWORK nor the career of an artist is a fixed entity. This is the ultimate takeaway from the retrospective at Turin, Italy’s Castello di Rivoli of sculptor Gilberto Zorio’s work, which consists of energetic ideas and objects that have shifted, grown, and intertwined over his five-decade career. The Italian artist is something of a hometown hero, having resided in the neighboring metropolis of Turin since graduating from its Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti in the 1960s. This local renown, however, belies his importance to international artistic discourse. From his early days (when

print December 2017

Jim Campbell

The phenomenology of perception goes electronic in Jim Campbell’s work. His signature homemade, high-tech fabrications include LED projectors, multiple-exposure photographs, diffusion screens, and moving images superimposed with treated Plexiglas. Titled “Far Away Up Close,” this exhibition featured fifteen works from the past year that presented viewers with either too much visual data or not enough, laying bare the work involved in seeing.

Installed at the show’s entrance was Data Transformation 1, a video rear-projected by more than a thousand LED lights onto a translucent Plexiglas screen.

previews September 2017

“LUCIO FONTANA: ENVIRONMENTS”

Most art-world denizens know Fontana as the maker of punctured and slashed monochrome canvases that seem to embody the nihilism and lingering violence of the postwar discourse on gesture. Few conoscenti, however, have closely read Fontana’s manifestos on Spatialism, which contextualize his plastic works as research into space, light, technology, and the cosmos. Fewer still have experienced his Spatial Environments, the immersive installations that occupied much of his last decade. In collaboration with the Fondazione Lucio Fontana,

print April 2017

Nicole Wermers

The playfulness of Nicole Wermers’s exhibition “Grundstück” belied a more serious project, one that engages the phenomenological implications of familiar forms. The German-born, UK-based artist highlights the peculiar coldness of modernism’s retail legacy by hijacking consumer objects and ludically subverting their intended uses. Here, Wermers presented three new bodies of work, each of which contrasts high and low and pits strict geometry against tendencies toward disorder.

The artist’s humorous approach was easily glimpsed in the five “Mood Boards,” 2016–17, hung along the gallery’s east wall.

print February 2015

Chris Finley

Chris Finley is a restless maker, and the results of his unflagging labors—a new series of sculptures and paintings—packed the industrious artist’s first solo show in five years. During that interim he was voraciously collecting and upcycling the mass-produced flotsam of everyday life: an old pair of jeans, a no-slip bath mat, a broken window screen, a shoe, vinyl place mats, a deflated yoga ball . . . In sir seek hoe (animal) (all works 2014), two 1970s-era Jim Henson puppets—along with various bits and pieces—are nestled between seemingly haphazard disks made from mismatched

print November 2014

Sara VanDerBeek

The apparent movement of the sun across the firmament is nearly impossible to measure with the naked eye, but human cultures have nonetheless used the changing quality of light to quantify time for millennia. The resulting concepts of “day” and “night” are entirely geocentric constructions, yet they persist. The conceit of a day/night separation structured “Ancient Objects, Still Lives,” Sara VanDerBeek’s two-room show of new photographs and sculptures, but, like the lived experience of a sky’s darkening, the diachronic movement was perceived almost exclusively in hindsight. Shot on film and

previews May 2014

Yves Klein/David Hammons

Nouveau Réaliste Yves Klein was notorious in the 1960s for using women as “human paintbrushes,” while American Conceptualist David Hammons gained renown a decade later for indexical drawings made using his own greased-up body. Though the two artists’ practices emerged from vastly different contexts and conversations, this exhibition—one of several inaugurating the AAM’s new downtown venue—contends that an irreverent attitude toward artmaking connects Klein and Hammons in intriguing ways. Three themes, “Ritual,” “Process,” and “Transformation,” promise

Elizabeth Mangini