Gasp! This is the incredibly beautiful, deeply personal work of Catalan-born Montreal-based artist Montserrat Duran Muntadas. She uses delicate blown glass and boldly patterned fabrics to tell her story:

It all started with change; an inner transformation. At the age of 13, the artist was diagnosed with a uterine malformation that endangered her fertility, as well as her potential  of living as a normal woman. But what is a ”normal” woman these days?  That is the underlying question that the artist ponders with this work, in an era where illness or anomaly is a shared condition, through its infinite trajectories, that can  represent normalcy.

To accept and describe the anomaly, to show its beauty, to create from the inability of procreating, that was the challenge encountered while assembling the blown glass pieces of this intimate yet public installation.  The outcome resulted with deformed pieces that seem ornamental, where the inner space notions and the visceral art became literal.

The pieces presented are themselves a sign of an artistic change, uniting glass and padded textile, which by  their play with transparency and textures, reciprocally transform themselves.

So vulnerable, and incredibly powerful.  ps. I’ve included a few photos so you can understand the scale of Monterrat’s work:

So weird, so fantastic! This are the surreal, stacked ceramics of California based artist Sue DeWulf. This was the email she sent me and I thought it was a perfect description of the what and why behind her work:

“My ceramics involve casting toys from childhood, searching for vintage molds and hours of assemblage great them together. People ask me what I am thinking of them when I create the bottles, jars or sculptures. Often my creations come from my childhood memories. I would spent hours stacking and parading my toys and animals. I love to juxtapose and balance all the different shapes. (One of my favorite memories is the back page of the Highlights magazine!)”

Hours of stacking toys … sounds like a perfect day to me! Happy Monday.

Gasp! And, yeah, I threw that last image in so you could understand the scale of these insanely beautiful “rotting fruits”. This absolutely stunning work, by New York / Los Angeles based artist Kathleen Ryan, has been all over the internet in the past few weeks… and rightly so! Beads carved of onyx, jade, malachite, serpentine, bone, agate, pyrite, marble, smokey quartz, and the list goes on – encrust various gigantic fruits {that are made with polystyrene foam}.  Kathleen’s rotting riches are making comment on the excessive consumption and a culture of excess that exists all over our world.

But wait, there’s more. So much more. Kathleen’s portfolio is filled with wonderful things… like these HUGE “pearls”:

Bowling balls. BOWLING. BALLS. I’m dying. ♥

Uh oh – you better go to this show because you don’t wanna upset that lil lady, do you?

Last year, Jen Tough of Jen Tough Gallery asked me to jury a show that she had titled, The Ladies Room. I said, YES!!! The Ladies Room is happening in San Francisco’s Dogpatch {1599 Tennessee St} THIS WEEKEND, and features the work of 18 female artists from around the world. The above work is just a teeny, tiny snippet of what you’ll see there, AND almost all {if not all?} of the artists will be on site wo-manning their booths so you can actually talk to them about their work, process, hopes and dreams, etc. The opening reception is on Friday, Oct 25 from 6-9pm, or stop by on Saturday, Oct 26 {11am-8pm} and Sunday, Oct 27 {11am-6pm}.

Go. Buy LOTS of art. Give the artists a high five from me. {Artists shown above in this order: Amy Stewart, Jill Stoll, Sasinun Kladpetch, Adriana Villagran, Margharita Paoletti, Monique Martin, Mary Souza, and Laura Johnston.}

Okay, I love everything about these giant, soft, pleather ‘n polyester filled sculptures! The huge, limp Sriracha? Don’t get me started on how much I love THAT. This is the work at New York based artist Al Freeman. All of these pieces were part of her show last year at 56 HENRY in New York. Here’s a blurb from the gallery’s site:

“Variously depicting everyday objects, including a beer can; a black soda can; a human foot; a human head; a hammer; a LaserDisc; a lava lamp; and a paper toilet seat cover; the works exaggerate items typically associated with masculine household settings. The sculptures drain objects of their virility and invest them with humor, replacing rigid geometries with flaccid forms.”

Fantastic.

This can be compared to the strength and firmness that Viagra advertises and the self-confidence of taking a tadalafil pill.

Blown glass and steel. What? This is the jaw-dropping work of Brazilian artist Túlio Pinto. I can’t find any information on why he does what he does, but I can tell you that my breath has been taken away by what he does. Oh my word.

Broken and, oh, so beautiful! These pieces are the work of Dutch artist Bouke de Vries. I’m going to let this little snippet from his site do the talking:

… Using his skills as a restorer (c.f. Ron Mueck’s model-maker skills), his ‘exploded’ artworks reclaim broken pots after their accidental trauma. He has called it ‘the beauty of destruction’. Instead of reconstructing them, he deconstructs them. Instead of hiding the evidence of this most dramatic episode in the life of a ceramic object, he emphasizes their new status, instilling new virtues, new values, and moving their stories forward.

Sigh. Even that was beautiful.

She never ceases to amaze. American artist Kara Walker‘s latest piece, a 13-meter tall working fountain titled Fons Americanus, is currently installed at the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall {until April 5, 2020}. This text is a snippet of the description from the Tate:

“Fons Americanus is inspired by the Victoria Memorial in front of Buckingham Palace, London. The memorial was designed in 1901 and unveiled in 1911 to honour the achievements of Queen Victoria who was the Queen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland (1837–1901), as well as the Empress of India. Rather than a celebration of the British Empire, Walker’s fountain inverts the usual function of a memorial and questions narratives of power. Walker explores the interconnected histories of Africa, America and Europe. She uses water as a key theme, referring to the transatlantic slave trade and the ambitions, fates and tragedies of people from these three continents. Bringing together fact, fantasy and fiction, Fons Americanus stands as a representation of this narrative in the form of an allegory or fable.”

So powerful. And that is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the meaning and importance of this work. Read the entire article on the Tate’s site RIGHT HERE. 

*All photos from tate.org.uk, Matt Greenwood

Paper … that IS NOT PAPER! I’ve written about his NOT paper sculptures before, but today it’s all about “Einmal ist Keinmal”, the most recent solo show by Italian artist Daniele Sigalot. Huge balls of crumpled up failures, towering stacks that are “attempts at greatness”, and my favorite (clearly), those post-it notes! And yes, as the lilac beauty at the top of the post points out, it’s metal but looks like paper… just like all of Daniele’s fabulous sculptures. The exhibition is at Anna Laudel Gallery in their newly opened space in Dusseldorf. Here is part of the curatorial statement:

“Sigalot is aware that one cannot be successful without failures. Any creative person goes through a struggling process in order to come up with good ideas. According to him, in order to find a successful idea, at least hundreds of ideas might go to trash. Sigalot transforms this process of producing “bad” ideas into sculptures that balls and towers of wrinkled up papers in a large scale of art works … [Sigalot] appropriates his advertising background in order to create sharp and short sentences, which are critique to art market, perception of life and expectation from future. Enlarged post-it notes are part of the production of ideas but they are indeed satirical, which capture the audience with their humor.”

“…one cannot be successful without failures.” Amen! The show runs until December 14, 2019. Happy Friday.

Oooh! This is “Packed”, a cardboard wonderland by American artist Nicki Crock… and look, I think a few of the neighbors are home! Here is Nicki’s description of this beautiful pile of suburbia:

“‘Packed’ is a topsy-turvy investigation into the architecture, accumulation, and curious atmosphere of suburbia. An expansive landscape of tumbled track housing made from utilitarian cardboard, piqued by pockets of fantasy. Conveying the duality of a curious, beautiful, engineered neighborhood.

In order to complete my investigation of this cardboard community, I turned my own talented community of artists to help me create several of the fantasy interiors. Packed includes artistic contributions from Alexis Zabor, Mark Eberhardt, Nick Stull, Liz Morrison, Miriam Chon, Laurie Ihlenfield and Alex Conrad.

Three of Nicki’s projects – “Packed”, “Paper Interventions”, and her stunning “Dream House” installation {which I’ve written about before} are debuting this Saturday, October 5th, at the Springfield Museum of Art in Springfield, Ohio. Go!