What if Kynaston McShine’s landmark 1966 presentation of objects, “Primary Structures: Younger American and British Sculptors,” had been global in scope? This is the question driving Jens Hoffmann’s inaugural two-part exhibition at the Jewish Museum, which brings together artists from South America, Asia, Africa, and Eastern Europe whose pared-down works share formal and conceptual affinities with those of their better-known contemporaries featured in the foundational show, such as Donald Judd and Robert Morris.

Dialogues between past and present, Western and “other” abound throughout this elegantly mounted exhibition. Geometric sculptures of varying sizes, shapes, and colors are flanked by blown-up black-and-white archival photographs of the original exhibition, which serve to extend the current installation in both time and space. In one arrangement, for instance, Argentinean artist Norberto Puzzolo’s Virtual Pyramid with Exterior and Interior View, 1967, a series of incrementally sized triangular frames made of painted wood, is set to face an image of Sol LeWitt’s No Title, 1966, a six-foot modular wooden cube. When seen together, these serial, nonreferential works offer a global reassessment of the complex visions and radical new approaches to sculpture in the 1960s.

However, the most inciting pieces resist, rather than mirror, the tenets of canonical “abc art.” The mixture of the modestly scaled, suspended mobiles of Polish Edward Krasiński, Brazilian Hélio Oiticica, and Venezuelan Gego in one room, or the subtle yet continuously bubbling, tubular machine of Filipino David Medalla in another, are but a few examples. Although this exhibition is a response to rather than a strict recreation of its predecessor, it culminates with an arresting, ten-foot-tall dollhouse—a painstaking model of the museum as it stood in 1966, complete with vibrantly colored Minimalist trappings—which provides a contrast to the achromatic photographs on view and allows one the chance to peer into a history nearly fifty years past.

— Natalie Musteata