ARTES MAGAZINE

Each year, OPEN generously peppers the beautiful island of Lido with unexpected, imaginative artistic surprises and is one of the most entertaining sculpture and installation exhibitions in the art world. Essentially an outdoor walking tour with a few in-hotel installations, OPEN begins the moment you disembark from the vaporetto onto the Piazzale St. Maria Elisabetta. [...]

My first encounter with Grand Catalina (2005-11) came unexpectedly, as I thumbed through the pages of the gallery section of an art magazine. Her uplifted face, eyes closed, suited and capped for laps in the pool, skin still moist with droplets of water as she appears to slip from the water, riveted me in an unexpected moment of intimacy with [...]

One thing becomes immediately clear upon entering the Fuller Craft Museum’s current exhibition, Fresh Figurines—these works, gathered from wide-ranging sources under the skillful eye of curator, Gail Brown, will redefine your notion of figurative porcelain. This is NOT your grandmother’s safe and sentimental collection, sitting behind glass in the corner hutch! While not quite a [...]

“Genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will, childhood equipped now with man’s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that enables it to bring order into the sum of experience, involuntarily amassed.” ~Charles Baudelaire “Happy, happy Christmas, that can win us back to the delusions of our childhood days, recall [...]

A dreary October afternoon, the pallid sky hidden under a stained glass tunnel of roadside, scarlet burning bush, mottled sassafras, and a canopy of golden honey locust teardrops; mystery is steeped in the air like fruit-infused vodka. Sculptor, Joseph Wheelwright’s Tree Figures at the Katonah Museum of Art, in Katona, NY have a similar effect—dizzying, somber, [...]

 The work of Massachusetts-based artist, Jonathan Prince, is currently on view until November 18th, at the Sculpture Garden in the atrium of the old IBM building, in New York City. Shown under the title Torn Steel, the work—like the artist, himself, who resembles Julian Schnabel—is big, bold and undeniably ambitious. But underneath the swagger of [...]

Picasso and the Guitar: Memory and Metaphor Inspired by, ‘Picasso: Guitars (1912-14)’- At the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, 2011 Though living in France most of his life, Picasso was a Spaniard, through-and-through, remaining proud of his birthright, cultural heritage and sun-drenched memories of childhood, over his lifetime. Any retrospective of his work [...]

‘Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul’ At the Newark  Museum, Now through August 14, 2011 Political oppression and slavery can bend the body, but not the spirit of a people. The current exhibit at the Newark Museum, Ajiaco: Stirrings of the Cuban Soul, is evidence of creativity unbowed, where freedom of expression flourishes and is made [...]

One of the most fascinating sculptors, active in late-gothic Germany, was Nicolaus (Niklaus or Niklas) Gerhaert, from Leyden. Despite the short period of his activity in Strasbourg, where he resided from 1463 to 1467, the works he created there proved influential, inspiring the sculptors of Southern Germany, up to the Reformation. Veit Stoß, Tilman Riemenschneider [...]

Anne Ferrer’s new series of colorful cloth sculptures, curated by Edward Rubin, is reminiscent of inflatable, shaped balloons that wink and bob in a kind of rhythmic modern dance. Up-down movements mingle with in-out ‘breathing’, as air slowly and randomly inflates and deflates each work. The seven pieces are composed as a tightly-clustered group. But [...]