Tag: installation art

rafa esparza at Artists Space

Titled ‘Camino’ or ‘Road,’ LA based performance and exhibition artist rafa esparza’s exhibition at Artists Space creates a pathway through the gallery space using blocks of adobe that connect earthen panels painted with portraits of Black and brown working people.  Interspersed are paintings of the 110 Freeway in Los Angeles, listed in the US National Register of Historic Places as the first freeway in the western United States.  Though esparza’s barefoot subjects literally connect to the land itself, the show considers how individuals and community connections to land have been disrupted by the highways that followed 110 and how customized vehicles (including the bike seen here) have provided a workaround and sense of identity.  (On view in Tribeca through Aug 18th).

rafa esparza, Jaime, acrylic on adobe and powder coated steel, painting: 85.5 x 50 x 3 inches, overall: 89 x 50 x 60 inches, 2023.

Spencer Finch at the Hill Art Foundation

It’s impossible not to gaze out over 10th Ave or the greenspace of the High Line Park through the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Hill Art Foundation’s gorgeous two-story Chelsea gallery space.  Spencer Finch – an artist who has made a career of simulating natural phenomena in gallery settings using a diverse range of media from photography to installation – reverses the outward look, inviting nature into the space. Inspired by Claude Monet’s desire to “paint air,” Finch has created an installation that recreates his direct observation of the light and color of the famous Impressionist’s garden in Giverny.  (On view through March 4th).

Spencer Finch, Painting Air, glass, hardware, wall painting, dimensions variable, 2012.

Chiharu Shiota at Templon Gallery

The huge line to enter Chiharu Shiota’s exhibition at Chelsea’s Templon Gallery last weekend speaks to the capacity of the Berlin-based Japanese artist to mesmerize audiences with the scale and intense labor of installations that elaborate on her ongoing theme of human connectivity.  A temporary installation fills the gallery’s front room, acting as portal to the rest of the exhibition and a place to marvel at the seemingly simultaneously chaotic and orderly network the artist created by suspending book pages in a web of thick white thread stapled to walls and floor.  Titled ‘Human Rhizome,’ the piece references an underground network of roots; in Shiota’s interpretation, the written word acts as an unseen communication network. (On view through March 9th).

Chiharu Shiota, Human Rhizome, thread and book pages, installation, ‘23

Sol LeWitt at Paula Cooper Gallery

Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings – some 1,200 sets of instructions for turning architecture into art – range from the simple (e.g. drawing lines in patterns going up, down and to the side) to the kind of full-room, immersive installation currently on view at Paula Cooper Gallery.  Energizing but restrained, a matte, fresco-like orange tone dominates, setting off multi-hued, isometric pyramids of various colors that seem to float through space.  In the center of the gallery, white enamel on aluminum sculptures resemble tips of icebergs adrift on the gallery’s polished concrete floor.  Surrounded by angular geometries in the cavernous rectangle of the gallery, visitors inhabit a parallel universe governed by alternative rules of color and space.  (On view on 21st Street in Chelsea through Oct 22nd).

Sol LeWitt, Wall drawing #485 (detail), three asymmetrical pyramids with color ink washes superimposed, color wash ink, 1986. Sol LeWitt, Complex Form #6 (to the right, detail), enamel on aluminum, 1987/1988.

Jesus Raphael Soto in ‘WAVE’ at Marlborough Gallery

Experiencing one of late Venezuelan kinetic artist Jesus Raphael Soto’s signature sculptures of hanging plastic cord in 1969, critic Guy Brett remarked that the participant’s ‘physicality was diffused,’ suggesting that moving through the piece breaks down the barrier between bodies and environment.  With or without visitors mingling among the threads in this piece in Marlborough Gallery’s summer group show of abstract and kinetic art, Soto’s installation challenges perception as it morphs from solid to ephemeral, suggesting a work always in flux.   (On view in Chelsea through Sept 10th.)

Jesus Rafael Soto, Penetrable Azul de Valencia, wood and pigmented plastic, unique, 108 5/8 x 366 1/8 x 108 ¼ inches, 1999.