The Whitney Museum of Art commemorates Alexander Calder’s beginnings with “The Paris Years, 1926-1933.” The renowned sculptor’s “Circus” has been a fixture at the Whitney since 1970, and the three-dimensional wire and paint characters dance under the big top and delight until February 15.
Photo © Whitney Museum of American Art, Photograph by Sheldan C. Collins
These alabaster sculptures created by Tom Sachs were constructed with foam, then rather unexpectedly cast in bronze, and finally (ironically) painted white. The artist has “recontextualized” the shy, basket-carrying “My Melody,” a licensed character by the famous Hello Kitty maker Sanrio, into a higher, more refined level for the Lever House, while still retaining its charm.
Courtesy Sperone Westwater, New York
Rachel Whiteread’s latest sculpture Place (Village) is a towering neighborhood of dozens of handmade English dollhouses with tiny illuminated windows. The more intimate exhibition allows spectators to peer into each window, and is of a smaller scale than Whiteread’s famously public monuments “Water Tower” in New York and “Holocaust Memorial” in Vienna. Voyeurs can take a glimpse until January 25 at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Courtesy the artist and Gagosian Gallery, London; Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Beginning February 17, 2009 a retrospective of Takashi Murakami’s work will display at the Guggenheim Bilbao. He has been highly influential in the last decade, fluidly merging Japanese anime and manga into more conventional art forms, and the presentation runs the gamut, with paintings, sculptures, installations, and film spanning the career of the Warhol-esque artist.
Courtesy of Guggenheim Bilbao
Walter Martin and Paloma Muñoz create entire worlds of clay in one of the tiniest, whimsical spaces imaginable—the inside of a snow globe—and then playfully photograph, then digitize the results. The forms look slightly out of Gulliver’s Travels and remind us that everyone felt small, at least at one time. Don’t blink or you’ll miss them—the display runs at Galeria Isabel Hurley in Spain through January 29.
The Neue Nationalgalerie, known as the “temple of light and glass,” contains modern European painting and sculpture and, until February 8, an exhibition by contemporary master Jeff Koons. The preeminent artist, whose influences span Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol, molds sculptures that appear as “magnified children’s toys or giant gift items” infused with a touch (or more) of kitsch.
Courtesy of Neue Nationalgalerie
An introspective look of Maurice Sendak, famed author and illustrator of the children’s novel Where the Wild Things Are, is provided at Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum & Library. There’s a Mystery There: Sendak on Sendak (open until May 3, 2009) showcases his personality and imagination through sketches, doodles, manuscripts, and books—all in his pursuit of uncovering “the Other Story,” what he calls the hidden meanings behind his text.
Courtesy of the Rosenbach Musem & Library
Tadashi Kawamata installed these organic public installations, called ‘displacements,’ around New York’s Madison Square Park in the latest undertaking of his three-decade career. A dichotomy of art, architecture, and sociological experimentation is formed by the unlikely displays. Contemporary art has never felt so transformative—or reminiscent of the early, carefree days of youth.
Ellen Page Wilson Photography, Courtesy of the Madison Square Park Conservancy
