October’s Picks
Franz West – Outdoor sculptures
Marais district, Paris (France)
Through December 10th, 2018
The fantastic retrospective on Austrian artist Franz West (who passed away in 2012), presented by the Pompidou Center in Paris since the beginning of September, is making its way out of the museum. A selection of some of his monumental outdoor works have taken over the Marais in several of the neighborhood’s museums and institutions. Kugel (2006), a spherical aluminum sculpture, is installed in the garden of the Picasso Museum, while the Cognac-Jay Museum hosts in its courtyard Ohne Titel (2008-2009), a late work that synthesizes Franz West’s plastic research on shapes as well as on materials, surfaces and colors. As for Omega (2008) and Meeting Point (2010), two gigantic monochrome “sausages”, a white one and the other green, they are displayed in the courtyard of the Historical Library of Paris in the hôtel Lamoignon. Finally, a fifth monumental sculpture by Franz West is installed in the main lobby of the Pompidou Center.
Sean Scully – Inside/Outside
Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield (United Kingdom)
Through January 6th, 2018
The Yorkshire Sculpture Park (YSP) presents a monographic exhibition on Sean Scully: the largest exhibition of the artist’s sculptures ever presented and the first one, in England, that combines his sculptures and his paintings. Sean Scully explores the notions of abstraction and landscape, whether in his aluminum paintings, his paper artworks or his monumental sculptures, which simultaneously invert and assert their materiality. During the past fifteen years, Sean Scully has been focusing more on sculpture, working with steel and stone. In the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, he installed several new works specifically created for the exhibition, including Wall Dale Cubed (2018), made of 1,000 tons of Yorkshire stone extracted from a local quarry, and Crate of Air (2018), an angular Corten steel structure that seems to frame the landscape in multiple ways.
Tony Oursler – Tear of The Cloud
Riverside Park South/Hudson River, New York (United States)
From October 10th to October 31st, 2018
It will only be visible at night, during the last three weeks of October. American artist Tony Oursler’s new multimedia piece, Tear in the Cloud, is projected onto the structure of the former transfer bridge of West 69th Street. The image stretches onto the surrounding landscape. A pioneer of video art in the 1980’s, Oursler offers here a true visual and auditory immersive experience.
The iconography used in the video is linked to the past and present identity of the place: from the Hudson River School – first American artistic movement – to the murder of Mary Rogers, whose body was found in the Hudson River, and including the utopian community of Oneida and experimental music in Lower Manhattan and the South Bronx. Stories intermingle, overlap and respond to one another, around a spectator who evolves in the space of the projection.
Cristina Iglesias – Interspaces
Centro Botín, Santander (Spain)
From October 6th, 2018 to March 3rd, 2019
For her exhibition at the Centro Botín, Spanish artist Cristina Iglesias has created From the Underground, a permanent installation in the gardens of the museum. The work is composed of five independent basins made of gray stone which surfaces are covered with a complex network of cavities and in the center of which water streams, spurts or stagnates. Cristina Iglesias plays with the idea of the well that only offers a glimpse of what is underneath the surface. The exhibition gathers twenty-two works that all share with From the Underground this fascinating power of representation of the living that Iglesias manages to convey into her work.
Bowl with Folds, by Ursula von Rydingsvard
Josephine F. Ford Sculpture Garden, College for Creative Studies (CCS), Detroit (United States)
A new work of art has just been added to the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts: Bowl with Folds (1998-1999), a monumental sculpture by German born American artist Ursula von Rydingsvard, whose work was already present in the collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts with Spoon Altar, purchased in 1990. This new piece, made of cedar wood and graphite, is a gift to the museum from patrons Janis B. and William M. Wetsman, and will be installed in the Josephine F. Ford Sculpture Garden of the College for Creative Studies (CCS). Bowl with Folds, which is particularly massive, is in fact a complex and skillfully designed combination of beams and prominent cuts. Ursula von Rydingsvard creates abstract shapes by alternating construction and destruction, assembling and cutting.
