Reviews

Hayward Gallery, London, is featuring work by 22 international artists in its recently inaugurated exhibition, Light Show, a tour that starts in the 1960s, a time when alliances between art, science and technology began to be forged; when artists on both sides of the Atlantic began to investigate light and its power to transform the perception of space.

A dose of humility and humor: this is what characterizes the work of Iván Argote (Bogotá, 1983), a young Colombian artist based in Paris.

In a closed space, everyday situations become altered. The order in which we have built a figuration of the world then provides us a dramatic quality, a theatricality which manifests itself through increasingly reduced and repetitive statements.

Carlos Huffmann (Buenos Aires, 1980) establishes diverse yet unavoidable relationships between the image and the word in La juventud de los ancestros, shown in Ruth Benzacar gallery.

Paper Folding, Odalis Valdivieso’s most recent series, is an interesting pun. And I say this based not only on the complex ad infinitum process of manual and digital manipulation which underpins the work, and which conceals a constant postponement of its meaning, but on the innumerable revisions of artistic tradition itself that this series comprises.

An acrid smell hangs thickly in the air of the Mandragoras Art Space where the crowd sips on red wine in anticipation of legendary Colombian performance artist María Evelia Marmolejo.

Julian Navarro Projects presented “Power Ties”, the first comprehensive exhibition of this series of Guerra de la Paz’s work that spans the past seven years of art-making.

On entering the Chilean artist Iván Navarro’s (1972) exhibition Fluorescent Sculptures, the first reference was inevitably the work of Dan Flavin (1933- 1996), since the latter was the artist who pioneered the use of neon tubes as the main material in his work.

A bee-hive, a swarm, a concert of nests made from recycled materials make up a soft architecture installation titled Qué nos rodea ( What surrounds us?) .

101 Dresses is the Brazilian sculptor Adriana Carvalho’s most recent one-person exhibition. The show is a retrospective look at her work from the years when she was an artist-in-residence at the Art Center South Florida, in Miami Beach.

“Extranjeros para nosotros mismos” is the title under which, in 1991, Julia Kristeva inquired into the development of a type of multiracial coexistence in 21st-century Europe.

In the center of Santiago de Chile, González & González gallery exhibits the work of four of the most important Latin American artists of our days.

Looking at a decade of artistic production over forty years ago, Open Work in Latin America, New York & Beyond: Conceptualism Reconsidered, 1967-1978 features thirty-six artists affiliated with Latin America, making work on the continent, abroad or in a situation of transience.

In Retroceso el sueño dormido, Andrés Monteagudo (Spain, 1970) prolongs the influence of his native city, Granada, on his childhood, through a poetics of the white cube that dissolves the boundaries between art and life.

The scene Rompimiento de Gloria, in which a light source irrupts from behind some clouds, dominating the space and transforming it into a place for contemplation characteristic of the Baroque, provides the title for the exhibition presented by Miler Lagos at Espacio Odeón.

Throughout more than thirty years of conscientious artistic career, the work of Lydia Azout (Bogotá, 1942) has been characterized by her constant research into ontological problems that define our place on the planet as well as our relationship with nature.

On an unseasonably warm fall day in October, on a Friday afternoon, I am at Y Gallery, where I am to meet Alberto Borea (b. 1979, Lima, Peru) to tour his second solo exhibition in New York titled “ Because of Construction” .

A collection of diverse actual and simulated objects, in which the only conceptual convergence consists in their being the recordings of a journey midway between imaginary and real, compose Mateo López’s exhibition, titled “Avenida Primavera, Casa No. 2”, at Casas Riegner Gallery, in Bogotá.

“Concerning the Spiritual in Art”, Aluna Art Foundation’s inaugural exhibit for this alternative curatorial space that opened its doors in August, showcased a collection of works by a group of artists both renowned and unrepresented within the Miami art scene, that reflect their search for “the spiritual in art”.

The 2010 retrospective exhibition “Carlos Cruz-Diez: Across Space and Time” at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston literally left a mark in the city. In front of the museum his designs have remained painted on the crosswalks.

I’ve been teaching, on and off, for about fifteen years, and frequenting art schools and university art departments as a visiting critic or the like for a good deal longer than that.

The first New York exhibition for Cuban artist Juan Roberto Diago Durruthy opened this month opened in September at the Magnan Metz Chelsea gallery. Described as distinctly “Afro-Cuban” the exhibition, “Entre Líneas | Between the Lines”, appears at first glance as a standard series of abstract grid canvases center-hung throughout the walls of the large two roomed space.

The exhibition of Iran do Espírito Santo (Mococa, Sao Paulo, 1963), featured simultaneously with that of Leda Catunda in another level of Ruth Benzacar Gallery, displays (strategically) a series of sculptures and an immense mural painting.

The New World Museum of Houston is one of the city’s premier exhibition spaces. It is modern, tasteful, and although it has only one very spacious room, it lends itself perfectly for one-person shows.

For one of his most recent works, entitled O levante (The Uprising), 2012 − the brute material for which is still in the process of being structured in order to provide it with a definitive format − Jonathas de Andrade organized the 1st Horse-drawn Cart Race in the center of Recife, where he lives.

This is not the usual Miguel Rio Branco exhibition. While the artist has explored female sexuality in more or less explicit contexts throughout his work, be it in his feverish exploration of brothels in Salvador or the depiction of cheeky schoolgirls of Tokyo, the artist delved into the idea of womanhood and feminine eroticism in his latest solo show at Millan gallery in São Paulo.

“Other impertinences”, the most recent solo show of Ana Tiscornia (born in Uruguay in 1951 and living in New York since 1991) continues her deeply rooted dialogue with memory and oblivion, through different channels.