reviews & critiques
Mark di Suvero: Steel Like Paper is an exhibition at the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas featuring work from the monumental sculptor’s more than sixty-year career. Remaining tethered to poetic themes of humanity are 30 sculptures and over 40 drawings and paintings. Color erupts in his images, which constantly change with perspective. The largest exhibition of di Suvero’s work since his solo show at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, here his abstract futurist gestures continue to lean towards optimism and joy — a contained, frenetic energy.
A myth and biblical narrative, The Tower of Babel follows the endeavor of society to build a structure so glorious it could bring them in touch with the heavens. However, when understood as a threat toward God, the single language of humankind was divided, shattering efforts to finish the construction. The myth tells us that unearned glory was the Babylonian’s demise. Artist Gabriel Dawe says their pursuit was an “epic exercise in futility.”
Far from her roots nestled in the central California valley, Natalie Wadlington makes her institutional debut at Dallas Contemporary with the solo exhibition Places that Grow. The show displays precise narrative paintings of childhood excursions on enormous, vibrant canvases. Set in highly domesticated spaces, the scenes lean heavily on the atmosphere of youthful wonder and innate care for the Earth, all set upon backdrops of dramatic Texas skies.
On view at Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, until May 7 was, Nothing Goes to Waste, an exhibit complete with works of reused materials. Existing vinyl was collaged for the title at the opening of the gallery, setting precedent for the pieces in the exhibit. Commenting less on the need for sustainability, reused materials are the mere impetus for the show’s focus on the curiosity of past lives of various mediums used in artworks.
The exhibit’s artworks cataclysmically combine color, shape, texture, and form to create visually disconcerting pieces that compel viewers to stoop and investigate.
The beauty, though imposed, is “held in suspension,” showing the delicate tension between fashioning one’s self into what society wants a woman to look like versus self-expression free of these expectations.
Currently on view at Link & Pin in South Austin is Synchronicity, a collection of recent portraits by painter Cheryl Finfrock and photographs by Eva Weiss dating back to 1972. On a crusade for universality, the exhibition ties the artists’ breadths together through their common subjects, which focus on the inelegance of being human. This candid exploration of people before and between performances or seminal moments combines incredibly similar but independently created works — a meaningful coincidence.