Calder: Hypermobility focuses on the extraordinary breadth of movement and sound in the work of Alexander Calder. This exhibition brings together a rich constellation of key sculptures and provides a rare opportunity to experience the works as the artist intended—in motion.

Daily gallery activations of Calder exhibition works will occur at the following times.
 

Monday–Thursday: 12 pm, 2 pm, 4 pm
Friday: 12 pm, 2 pm, 4 pm, 7:30 pm, 8 pm, 9 pm
Saturday: 11 am, 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm, 5 pm, 6 pm, 7 pm, 8 pm
Sunday: 11 am, 12 pm, 1 pm, 2 pm, 3 pm, 4 pm

Hélio Oiticica: To Organize Delirium is the first full-scale U.S. retrospective in two decades of the Brazilian artist’s work. One of the most original artists of the twentieth century, Oiticica (1937—1980) made art that awakens us to our bodies, our senses, our feelings about being in the world: art that challenges us to assume a more active role. Beginning with geometric investigations in painting and drawing, Oiticica soon shifted to sculpture, architectural installations, writing, film, and large-scale environments of an increasingly immersive nature, works that transformed the viewer from a spectator into an active participant. The exhibition includes some of his large-scale installations, including Tropicalia and Eden, and examines the artist’s involvement with music and literature, as well as his response to politics and the social environment. The show captures the excitement, complexity, and activist nature of Oiticica’s art, focusing in particular on the decisive period he spent in New York in the 1970s, where he was stimulated by the art, music, poetry, and theater scenes. While Oiticica engaged at first with many of the city’s artists, he ended up living in self-fashioned isolation before returning to Brazil. He died in Rio de Janeiro, in 1980, at the age of 42.

A presentation of Italian architect and designer Ettore Sottsass (1917–2007). Including architectural drawings, interiors, furniture, machines, ceramics, glass, jewelry, textiles and pattern, painting, and photography. The exhibition presents Sottsass's work in dialogue with ancient and contemporaneous objects that inspired him, as well as his influence on designers working today. 

Museum: Met Breuer | 945 Madison Ave. 

All About This Side invokes this other side of human existence through an intense examination of the nominally protective barriers and constructs we have erected around it. A fence against unaccepted current realities and an unacceptable future is already well under construction. The architects of our generation are more inclined to put their creative energies into making this fictional barrier as permanent as possible as opposed to building a sustainable habitat for modernity’s survivors. However, this side of the ‘mind’ is nearly at the verge of exhaustion, and is unable to continue propping up its clusters of ‘cultural enactment’. There must be another, very different, mind watching every short-sighted, selfish action we commit to prolong our own existence from the other side of the wall; the wall we believe will protect us from our own nature. Or, in the artist’s words, “the future of this present has become the past of any ‘past’ we could ever imagine.”

OPEN  TUES-SAT 10AM-6PM

In his fifth solo show at Anton Kern Gallery, the California-based painter Brian Calvin presents a new body of work featuring tightly-cropped portrait paintings, colored pencil drawings, and anthropomorphic wooden sculptures.

Through repetition of his archetypal female figure, the artist invites us to look past the inviting face we are confronted by, and consider the idiosyncrasies of his formal choices. By reducing the face to its essential features, and isolating eyes, lips, hair, each work offers pieces of a code for the viewer to interpret.

Levinthal’s paintings are about feeling, family, and living in the real world. She confronts familial interaction and varied accompanying emotions simply and directly. She freely and openly without apology allows us to view the intimate and personal exchanges in her own life which, in turn, provokes us to examine and confront them in our own. The everyday fleeting moments delivered in her paintings convey with humor, freshness, and reflection a great deal about this artist, and the life she lives.

Over the past six years, Lin has collected around 2,000 words and expressions about women in various languages. Pulling from popular novels, newspapers, the internet, and colloquial dialogues, she has gathered phrases such as “divinité,” “Mori girl,” and “leftover women.” Some are predictably derogatory to women, demonstrating the continued ubiquity of sexist attitudes reinforced by language, while others are directly recovered from obsolescence, representing the nuanced mix of confusion, humor, self-deprecation, and empowerment that accompanies the shifting consciousness of women. This lexicon is woven into thickly raised wool forms so that viewers can feel the visceral and literal protruding patterns while touching and walking on the carpets.

A pioneer of West Coast conceptualism since the 1960s, Allen Ruppersberg mines the aesthetics and ephemera of popular culture and mass media, reorganizing the substance of collective memory to conjure a uniquely personal narrative. Reanimating various forms of printed matter and the written word, he engages language both as formal element and social artifact.

8th Floor

Apfelbaum draws inspiration from graphic designer Rudolph deHarek’s cover design for The Potential of Woman, which features a flattened, stylized view of a female figure’s head. Her appropriation of this image, chosen as an icon, is consistent with her ongoing interest in applied design and popular culture. Apfelbaum was also fascinated by the book’s provocative and ultimately patronizing message. The book and its related symposium imagined a future in which women might be useful contributors; Apfelbaum instead reflects the desire for a broader appreciation and empowerment of legions of capable women in the present. In the exhibition’s title, Apfelbaum changes the word ‘woman’ to ‘women’ to reinforce an inclusive communal narrative around feminism.

Stanley Whitney has been exploring the formal possibilities of color within ever-shifting grids of multi-hued blocks and all-over fields of gestural marks and passages, since the mid-1970s. His exhibition at Lisson Gallery New York will be the first major presentation of his drawings, highlighting important works from 1989 to the present. Whitney’s works on paper are a critical component of his practice, in which he develops his spatial structure and experiments with the placement of color.

Smith established his key motif while perusing an athletic catalogue in the late 1940s. Examining the pencil drawings of baseballs and tennis balls in it, Smith began to imagine that from these simple shapes he could create a new kind of space. As he described:

“It was flat and the same time it was curved. It was like a sphere. The planes seemed to move in every direction, as space does. And so I thought, maybe that is because that’s on the tondo. I’ve got to find out if that is true or not. I’ve got to do some on a rectangle to see if the form and the space still moved in every direction. And it did. So it was exciting to do a painting on a rectangle that seemed to have a curved surface. It was the first time, you see, that I had made an important step myself, or contribution in art.”