Kate Green

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  picks December 07, 2011

  Walter De Maria

  Walter De Maria’s first major US museum exhibition features just nine works, but it sheds an illuminating light on his nearly fifty-year career. The lesser-known objects on view suggest that this seminal artist has much more to offer than the 1970s Land art projects for which he is renowned, among them The Lightning Field and The New York Earth Room (both 1977). Unlike those permanent installations, the six sculptures and three paintings at the Menil are neither composed of the land nor site-specific. Nevertheless, they expand understandings of the artist’s formal and conceptual concerns through

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  picks June 22, 2011

  Carlos Cruz-Diez

  The Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez is well known within Latin America as a pioneering Conceptualist, but he is lamentably less familiar to audiences elsewhere. “Carlos Cruz-Diez: Color in Space and Time,” a retrospective spanning his sixty year career, should help spread the word. The show features over one hundred and fifty works—paintings, sculptures, environments, public interventions—made between 1940 and the present, and it proves that the artist deserves wider recognition for engaging the phenomenology of color and form in startling ways.

  The sprawling exhibition includes many memorable

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  picks April 07, 2011

  Gabriel Vormstein

  Those familiar with Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and interest in the avant-garde will find it appropriate that not all the elements in his first solo museum exhibition come together flawlessly. The artist is known for using watercolors, spray paint, and everyday materials to redraw figures and shapes from art history—the angular women of Viennese Expressionism, the geometric forms of Minimalism—on newspapers. Today’s news is partially obscured by Vormstein’s re-creations; past and present coexist uneasily. This exhibition includes one of his newsprint paintings (The Winter, 2010) and some