Artist Reviews
Santiago Cal
When most of us want to relive memorable moments in our past, we look to snapshots. That two-dimensional depiction of a birthday party or graduation ceremony is what we identify with that moment in time. The sculptor Santiago Cal, however, instead takes out a block of basswood and cuts and trims away at the malleable material, shapes and... More »
The American Hand
The accomplished, mostly small-scale works in “The American Hand: Sculpture from Three Centuries,” at Babcock Galleries in New York City (February 2–March 16, 2012), reflected not only their makers’ skills but also the milieu in which they were created. Take, for example, Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s (1848–1907) Diana of the Tower (modeled... More »
Sabin Howard, Javier Marín
“Re-Presenting the Nude,” on view during July at Evoke Contemporary in Santa Fe, offered a lively overview of realist approaches to a perennial genre. The exhibition, curated by John O’Hern, included sculpture and drawings as well as paintings. O’Hern emphasized the content always implicit in the figure: “The body and its senses are our... More »
Akio Takamori
Akio Takamori, a gifted and innovative American ceramic artist, exhibited two groups of large sculptures in fired clay, painted with underglazes, at Barry Friedman Ltd. in New York City this fall. The artist quoted iconic figures from art history in clever, poignant and formally inventive ways. The first group evoked the character of... More »
Javier Marín
The seven beautifully expressive, bearded bronze heads in this exhibition at Nohra Haime Gallery (May 20–June 20, 2009), by the Mexican artist Javier Marín, each stand almost five feet tall, flowing beards included. They are mounted on narrow steel pillars with circular bases, and above these severe geometries their beards proliferate,... More »
Javier Marín
The seven beautifully expressive, bearded bronze heads in this exhibition at Nohra Haime Gallery (May 20–June 20, 2009), by the Mexican artist Javier Marín, each stand almost five feet tall, flowing beards included. They are mounted on narrow steel pillars with circular bases, and above these severe geometries their beards proliferate,... More »
Bessie Potter Vonnoh
One of the most successful women artists of her generation, Bessie Potter Vonnoh (1872–1955) specialized in accomplished images of women and children. At a time when the field of American sculpture was dominated by men creating large, public monuments, she designed intimate works for domestic interiors and gardens, elevating the quality... More »
Albrecht Dürer
Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was a virtuoso graphic artist whose woodcuts and engravings raise him to the first rank of Renaissance artists. Seizing the opportunity provided by Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press in 1450, he embarked on an ambitious scheme to document the wonders of nature and to illustrate Europe’s dominant... More »
Meredith Bergmann
Figurative public sculpture, a mainstay for millennia, seems to be re-emerging as a viable artform after a half-century of modernist abstraction in civic spaces. But the world has changed since the golden age of Daniel Chester French, Augustus Saint-Gaudens and the American Renaissance; the old paradigms cannot be unquestioningly... More »