Bathrooms and all their bodily associations inspired this unforgettable life-sized porcelain and stoneware sculpture by Ann Agee. Another less private domestic object – folk art salt cellars from Florence, Italy – prompted the ceramic sculpture in the artist’s current online exhibition at ppowgallery.com. Merging the functional with the devotional, each artwork features a Madonna and child-like pairing but with a twist – the youngsters are girls. (Online at PPOW Gallery through June 27th).
Gianni Versace’s 1991-92 jacket, featuring a Madonna and child embroidered in crystals, draws on the gold tile and opulent patterning of Ravenna’s Byzantine architecture. Part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s stunning ‘Heavenly Bodies’ Costume Institute exhibition, the garment joins icons from the Met’s collection in a contemporary reinterpretation of opulence. (On view on the Upper East Side through Oct 8th).
This washed out figure is a faded but haunting recurring image in Andrew Kreps Gallery’s retrospective of work by San Francisco-based artist and graphic designer Robert Overby. Based on a 16th century Madonna by Albrecht Durer, Mary’s imposing, weirdly angled eye suggests an oddly provocative madness. (In Chelsea through Oct 31st).
Robert Overby, detail of ONE EYED-GRID, offset lithograph on paper on plywood, 18 ½ x 14 ¾ inches, 1975.
Once loved, now up on blocks, this childhood relic looks like it’s headed for the dump if it doesn’t disintegrate first. However, like the rest of the work in this unassuming exhibition by LA-based sculptor Kristin Morgin, it’s an eye-teasing triumph made entirely of unfired clay. (At Chelsea’s Zach Feuer Gallery through May 3rd).
Kristen Morgin, Madonna with Tricycle, unfired clay, paint, ink, wood, wire, 20 x 16 x 28 inches, 2013.
You don’t have to be into fashion to appreciate the spectacle that is ‘The Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier’ at Brooklyn Museum. A moving catwalk, mannequins with animated faces, and more turn the normally sleepy Brooklyn Museum into a carnival celebrating Gaultier’s extravagant, gender-bending vision, which germinated in childhood when he fashioned a conical bra for his teddy, some 30 years prior to his designs for Madonna’s ‘Blond Ambition’ tour. (At Brooklyn Museum through Feb 23rd).
Jean Paul Gautier, ‘Nana’ from 1957; ‘chest of drawers with integrated vanity,’ prototype, 1992; and “Black Swan Collection,” modele Saut de l’Ange, Haute couture fall/winter 2011-12.
