Judy Chicago in Glass
Until 15 January 2022 at Nina Johnson, 6315 NW 2nd Avenue, Miami
The prolific artist Judy Chicago—best-known for her vibrant kaleidoscopic paintings and the landmark feminist work The Dinner Party (1974-79)—began working with glass in the early 2000s, creating sculptures of the human form that often depict evocative busts or closed fists. This exhibition focuses on two series from this lesser-known facet of Chicago’s career, called Head’s Up and Hands, some of which incorporate cast glass with bronze, evoking both the fragile and strong physicality of their subjects. In addition to a series of earlier drawings that correspond with the glass works, the show includes a new large-scale abstract sculpture titled Zig Zag (1965/2021), a steel version of an earlier piece made when Chicago produced her signature Minimalist sculptures and paintings that demonstrate her earliest investigations of the colour palette and rhythmic, conjoining geometric shapes.
Natural Successor
Until 5 February at Piero Atchugarry Gallery, 5520 NE 4th Avenue, Miami
This sculpture exhibition, which features an international roster of artists including Henrique Oliveira, Roberto Pugliese, Artur Lescher, Arcangelo Sassolino and Yuken Teruya, considers the Anthropocene and how humans have sought to dominate and reshape nature. The Brazilian artist Oliveira, for example, has reconfigured discarded pieces of wood collected in the streets of São Paulo into a menacing abstract sculpture, and the Italian artist Pugliese’s Critici Ostinati Ritmici (2010) takes the form of a “tree on life support”, or a hollowed trunk attached to wired equipment that produces an echoed clicking noise which corresponds to live statistics on hectares of deforestation worldwide. The art dealer Piero Atchugarry is the son of the renowned Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry—the mastermind behind the development of the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Atchugarry, a landmark contemporary art museum in Punta del Este that will open in January—whose works are also in the exhibition.
Hernan Bas: Nightlite
Until January 15 2022 at Fredric Snitzer Gallery, 1540 NE Miami Court, Miami
The Miami native artist Hernan Bas presents a small selection of paintings that expand on his romantic vision of androgynous sensuality. His male figures are inspired aesthetically by the male dandy but the settings and sartorial choices are decidedly modern. Whether in a bar or at the tomb of Oscar Wilde, his works are highly detailed and lushly painted, some so ornately appointed as to border on the fantastical. For this exhibition, he continues exploring male relationships and the male gaze from a homoerotic perspective. In Torch Fishing for Flounder (2021), Bas depicts two men practicing a centuries-old tradition of spearing fish at night, an activity that Bas calls “hopelessly (Southern) gothic in its romance”; the image of two men alone at night, their faces lit by fire and surrounded by lush reeds indeed has an implicit eroticism. The men look at the viewer as if caught in some forbidden act.