New York Art Tours celebrates the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s reopening to the public today with a look at this Seated Male Figure from the museum’s current ‘Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara’ exhibition. Fueled by global trade and transformed by the arrival of Islam, the region’s empires produced masterpieces like this terracotta figure whose identity is unknown. (On view through Oct 26th. View the Met’s new guidelines before visiting.)
Like models strutting down a catwalk, a row of abstracted ceramic figures by nonagenarian LA artist John Mason exude confidence and style. Recalling Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, Brancusi’s sculpture and Lygia Clark’s bichos they combine Cubist form, Futurist dynamism with a suggestion of moveability often alien to ceramics. (On view at Albertz Benda Gallery in Chelsea through Jan 13th).
No other gallery security staff are as subtle as Tom Friedman’s ‘Guardian,’ a light projection above Luhring Augustine’s exit. Friedman’s entire show does away with his usual labor-intensive sculpture techniques, substituting instead alluring objects and figures that might disappear at the press of a power button. (On view in Chelsea through Oct 28th).
Nicola Tyson’s freewheeling firewood sculptures embody a grace that belies their origins in the woodpile. Stripping each piece of dried firewood of its bark, Tyson assembles fleshy ‘dancing figures’ as disproportionate assemblages of thick and thin segments that bring to mind human bodies, trees and robots. (In ‘Somebodies’ at Petzel Gallery in Chelsea through Aug 4th).
New York artist Richard Dupont inaugurates Tracy Williams Ltd‘s new Lower East Side location with sculptures and drawings of distorted bodies that recall both digital effects and fun-house mirrors. (Through July 29th).
Richard Dupont, Lauren, Marylene 1, bronze (polished), 30 x 17.5 x 8 inches, 2014-15.
