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Milan, “Under the Sun, Beyond the Skin” (Until Dec. 14)
For the conception of these outdoor sculptures, Italian artist Sara Enrico began with the pertinent question of what it means to superimpose something man-made on nature. What she came up with involves works of fabric, pigment, concrete, and steel—of varying degrees of artificiality—installed in the plush gardens of Milan’s Villa Reale as part of the Furla Series that promotes contemporary female artists. She described the exhibition as a “landscape within a landscape,” drawing a slippery line between organic life and synthetic human creations. gam-milano.com
Los Angeles, “Hélio Oiticica” (Opens Sept. 17)
By sixteen, Hélio Oiticica was dismantling Brazilian modernism. In the early ’50s, Oitica joined Grupo Frente, a collective of painters rejecting local modernist orthodoxies in favor of pure color, structure, and experimentation. The gouaches he produced in the mid-1950s—several included in this exhibition—begin to test the limits of order. By 1958, Oiticica left the constraints of two-dimensions behind, producing suspended painted wooden planes called Spatial Reliefs. This L.A. exhibition, a first, charts the Brazilian artist’s restless trajectory. lissongallery.com
New York, “Joel Shapiro” (Until Oct. 11)
Joel Shapiro’s 1970 debut at Paula Cooper Gallery opened minimalism up to personal history. His iron and bronze sculptures were small but weighty, carrying what Peter Schjeldahl described as “emotions as vehement as a child’s fears combined with something akin to the austere discipline of a scientist.” In later decades, Shapiro’s work scaled up into massive, block-like figurative sculptures that animated public places and museum courtyards. Following his death earlier this year, the gallery revisits those early sculptures and works on paper from the ’70s, the modest but seminal predecessors to his public commissions. paulacoopergallery.com
Paris, “Jaume Plensa: 5 rêves, 5 désirs” (Until Oct. 25)
Since the 1980s, Catalan sculptor Jaume Plensa has scaled the human portrait to huge proportions. Like Chicago’s Crown Fountain, two 50-foot high LED videos of Chicago residents that shoots water from their pursed lips. Or Water’s Soul in Jersey City, an 80-foot tall woman’s head that can be seen from New York. These oversized heads and faces seem to transform the human portrait into spectacular architecture. His new exhibition in Paris scales down his vision to a more intimate scale, gathering recent works in alabaster, iron, bronze, along with drawings. galerie-lelong.com
New York, “Robert Rauschenberg’s New York: Pictures from the Real World” (Until Apr. 19)
Born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925, Robert Rauschenberg is celebrated for revolutionizing postwar art. Less widely known, but vital, is his photography. Rauschenberg recorded the textures of the city with the same appetite for material that fueled his Combines. “I think a picture is more like the real world when it is made out of the real world,” he said in 1964. This exhibition reveals Rauschenberg’s distinctive portrait of America through his photographs, including a three-year survey of American cities first conceived during his student years. mcny.org
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