A Celebrated Artist Tries on Design
Swiss artist Urs Fischer's functional designs debut in New York. Plus, fractured portraits, revised paintings, and more art highlights.
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New York, “David Alekhuogie: Highlifetime” (Until Oct. 18)
In 1935, Walker Evans was commissioned by MoMA to document hundreds of African sculptures for the exhibition African Negro Art. Nearly 90 years later, L.A. photographer David Alekhuogie reworks Evans’ photographs, dismantling the legacies of authorship and appropriation behind Western presentation of African art. Alekhuogie transposes the original images onto 3D cardboard sculptures, which he then photographs against backdrops of East and West African textiles. This series, as well as selections from a 2017 series Pull_Up, are presented here. yanceyrichardson.com
Boston, “Portia Zvavahera: Hidden Battles / Hondo dzakavanzika” (Until Jan. 19)
“Transferring the energy of my dreams into my paintings has helped me heal myself,” Portia Zvavahera explains, describing the tense atmosphere of her textured paintings. Born in Harare in 1985, the Zimbabwean painter plumbs her subconscious imagination, producing ominous spirits—lanky, mouthless—usually decorated with lace, wax, and palm fronds. Her transcendental scenes come to the States for her first solo museum show. icaboston.org
New York, “Echoes & Evolutions: Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels” (Until Oct. 25)
In 1974, Nancy Holt purchased 40-acres of flat plains in Utah’s Great Basin Desert and began working on her masterpiece, Sun Tunnels. The four mammoth concrete cylinders placed in the shape of an X frame the sun on the summer and winter solstices. This exhibition offers insight into Holt’s process and ideas behind the Sun Tunnels, amassing her drawings, photographs of cardboard models, and a 16-millimeter film from 1978. spruethmagers.com
Cambridge, “Edna Andrade: Imagination Is Never Static” (Until Jan. 4)
Edna Andrade’s Motion 4-64, a 48-inch square oil painting of black-and-white rectangles that bulge despite their right angles, is the work that made her name. While she’s most famous for these later optical illusions, the American painter absorbed everything from Surrealism to Bauhaus and produced intriguing watercolors, ink drawings, and colorful geometric abstractions too. “It’s a decision to be totally visual,” she said about her tendency towards abstraction. “A story doesn’t go with it.” Here, a collection of Andrade’s drawings, raw graphite sketches, and studies reveal the raw experimentation behind her tricks of the eye. harvardartmuseums.org
New York, “Sasha Gordon: Haze” (Opens Sept. 25)
After her first-ever breakup, 27 year old Sasha Gordon painted an intense self-portrait in which she sits nude on a rock in the middle of dark waters. “I had emotions I’ve never dealt with before,” she explained. “It felt very necessary to paint these feelings.” Gordan mostly paints herself, not out of vanity, but in the way a writer might use the “I” perspective to untangle deeply complicated, universal feelings. Her newest paintings, on show here, verge on modern anxieties. davidzwirner.com
