Pawel Althamer: The Neighbors, through 13 April at New Museum, Lower East Side
For Althamer’s first museum exhibition in the US, curators Mas Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari gather together the artist’s most iconic works, including his Venice Bienniale contribution, The Venetians, which does the flayed spectacle of ‘Body Worlds’ one better, and the videos in which we get to see Althamer on drugs and in search of enlightenment (spoiler: he doesn’t find it).
Mira Schendel, through 26 April at Hauser & Wirth, Upper East Side
Schendel’s work offers yet another instance of the Bauhaus’s long reach into the Americas, and into Brazil in particular. Next to her countrywomen Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape, Schendel is the more conservative, but no less remarkable and worthy of praise.
David Altmejd: Juices, through 8 March at Andrea Rosen, Chelsea
If you haven’t caught it, David Altmejd’s The Flux and The Puddle, another of the artist’s major confabs caught in a matrix of Plexiglas doesn’t disappoint. Grotesque and playful, it goes to show what a little imagination and a lot of labour can do.
Ward Shelley and Alex Schweder: In Orbit, through 5 April at The Boiler, Williamsburg
Part circus stunt, part metaphor for human partnership, Shelley and Schweder are inhabiting, 24 hours a day until Sunday, a 25-foot wheel (think miniature DIY space station). It’s the most recent iteration of what Schweder calls ‘performance architecture’. And you thought the art fairs were grueling.
Jorge Pardo, through April 5 at Friedrich Petzel, Chelsea
Craving a little intimacy, perhaps some pillow talk, after the anonymity and inanity of art fair social life? Find refuge in the bedroom that the LA-based Pardo has installed in Friedrich Petzel’s Chelsea space.
March 2014
