Muralla Alteña, 2013, plastic bags, wood, 600x380cm

El Choco, installation view

Luciano Calderon with Sandra Arcani, the producer of the knitted body and masks

Ahora Tienes Un Problema, Fuera De Control, El Dinero Es Mentira, 2013, hand woven masks

El Choco, installation view

Patrullando & Vigilando, 2013, two channel video, dimensions variable, Ed. 5

Crimen Andino, 2013, mixed on canvas, 200x150cm

Yo Soy El Alto, 2013, mixed media on canvas, 150x200cm

Estoy Perdido, 2013, mixed media on canvas, 120x150cm

Tienda Andrea, 2013, mixed media on canvas, 150x200cm

El Choco, installation view

Last week Luciano Calderon’s exhibition opened.

Click for all the information about the exhibition.

Tam Wai – Falling into the Mundane World, 2013

Falling into the Mundane World, commissioned for this project, reflects Tam’s ongoing interest in working in the public realm and exploring myriad responses to specific sites and contexts. The oversized female legs and cockroach sculptures point to ubiquitous aspects of life in Hong Kong as well as underlying ills that plague contemporary society at large.

Paul McCarthy – Complex Pile

Complex Pile is a 51-foot-high, 110-foot-long, inflatable sculpture of a twisted pile of excrement. Embodying his rare ability to leverage bad taste to infiltrate the well-mannered confines of the art world, Complex Pile mocks its picturesque surroundings and pokes fun at the prudent qualities of public sculpture.

Choi Jeong Hwa – Emptiness is Form. Form is Emptiness, 2013

Departing from his usual cheery hues, Emptiness is Form. Form is Emptiness re-casts this iconic symbol of purity as something seemingly dark, or solemn. By placing the work on the future site of the park of West Kowloon Cultural District, a plot of land which cannot be said to be either wholly natural or man-made, Choi also points to hazy relationships between nature and artifice, urban and non-urban space, and to the presence, or absence, of nature within Hong Kong’s increasingly urban, often consumer-frenzied environment.

Cao Fei – House of Treasures, 2013

Fascinated by places and moments in which people can bring their private imaginings to life and intersect with the public sphere, Cao has created House of Treasures, an outsize inflatable suckling pig that celebrates themes of prosperity and abundance. Part playful interactive attraction, part nod to Hong Kong’s food-obsessed culture, House of Treasures injects a space of leisure and pleasure into the West Kowloon site, while prompting visitors to ponder the meaning behind such enjoyment.

Tomás Saraceno – Poetic Cosmos of the Breath (photo by Nicholas Tse)

Inspired by the work of Dominic Michaelis, an English architect and inventor who pioneered the technology for a solar-powered hot air balloon, Poetic Cosmos of the Breath is a time-based experimental solar dome that takes flight only under certain climatic conditions. It uses deceptively simple materials — a paper-thin foil membrane accompanied by a few sandbags and a handful of participants, to produce a startlingly ethereal, shimmering effect.

Jeremy Deller – Sacrilege, 2012

Sacrilege, a life-size bouncy castle in the shape of Stonehenge, encapsulates Deller’s interest in the generative spirit of public participation. By recasting one of the world’s most famous existing prehistoric monuments (closed to the public since 1977) as an interactive public sculpture, he allows audiences to reacquaint themselves with history in a high-spirited and entertaining manner.

Jeremy Deller – Sacrilege, 2012

VIDEO

Inflation! is the name of a project that shows six large-scale inflatable sculptures on the site of the Park at West Kowloon Cultural District. The large-scale inflatable sculptures by Cao Fei (China), Choi Jeong Hwa (South Korea), Jeremy Deller (UK), Jiakun Architects (China), Paul McCarthy (USA), and Tam Wai Ping (Hong Kong) pose questions about the nature of public art and the ways in which audiences might engage with it. The works are on public display until 9 June 2013.

By transforming the current site into a (con)temporary sculpture park of inflatables, Inflation! attempts to consider how certain realities and preconceptions around art in public space can be altered, undermined and challenged in the context of an evolving and endlessly mutating cultural and urban landscape.

> Directions and more information about guided tours, interpretive performances, workshops and talks

Images: AP / Getty, via Dailymail

Video

Photos

How I Roll, 2012; Rotating Piper Seneca, steel supports, motor

How I Roll, 2012; Rotating Piper Seneca, steel supports, motor

For two months a small air plane was rotating 24 hours a day in summer 2012 in Central Park, NYC. Previous works by Paola Pivi have also featured large machines, including an overturned tractor-trailer and a helicopter placed upside down.

Born in Milan, Italy, in 1971 and now based in Anchorage, Alaska, Paola Pivi’s diverse artistic practice embraces sculpture, photography, video, and performance. How I Roll is Pivi’s first public commission in the United States.

(Photos by Attilio Maranzano, via)

Video

Photos

Desert Rooftops by David Brooks is a 5,000-square-foot sculpture that is an wavy configuration of multiple asphalt-covered rooftops similar to those on suburban developments, McMansions and strip malls conjoined to resemble a rolling, dune-like landscape.

The piece examines issues of the natural and built landscape by comparing the monoculture that arises from unchecked suburban and urban sprawl with that of an over-cultivated landscape – creating a work that is picturesque, familiar and simultaneously foreboding. Brooks’ sculptural approach gives a nod to Robert Smithson’s earthworks and Gordon Matta-Clark’s building cuts while offering a much needed sense of humor to help digest today’s somber environmental issues.

As housing communities devour more and more land and resources each year the outcome is equivalent to the very process of desertification. The United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification defines desertification as: land degradation into arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including human activities and climatic variations derived from over-development, over-grazing and an overworked land. The result is often a depleted landscape inhospitable to other life.

David Brooks (b. 1975) is an American sculptor and installation artist, whose work considers the relationship between the individual and the built and natural environment. Brooks has exhibited large-scale installations at Dallas Contemporary, Miami Art Museum, Nouveau Musée National de Monaco, Bold Tendencies London, as well as American Contemporary and the Sculpture Center in New York. Brooks was featured in the 2010 Greater New York at MoMA PS1 and lives and works in NYC.

(Photos by James Ewing, courtesy of Art Production Fund)

Fat car, 2001

Fat car, 2005

Telekineticaly bent VW van, 2006

UFO, 2006

Truck, 2007

Erwin Wurm, one of Austria’s most important and internationally famous sculptors, has been preoccupied with expanding the concept of sculpture since the 1980s. Wurm is primarily a sculptor, and traditional sculptural concerns such as the relationship between object and pedestal, the function of gravity, the fixing of form, and the manipulation of volume, play through all his work.

Increasing, remodeling or removing volume, the habitual interests of many sculptors, are given a new twist in Wurm’s work. Volume and adding volume are treated as sociocrital issues. In 1993, Erwin Wurm wrote an instructional book on how to gain two clothing sizes in eight days. Eight years later, he made his first Fat Car by plumping up an existing car with styrofoam and fiberglass, which resulted in a pitiful, chubby version of the original sportsy model. By taking the question of obesity, Wurm probes the link between power, wealth and body weight. He also wants to offer a sharp criticism of our current value system, as the advertising world demands us to stay thin but to consume more and more.

> also see his One Minute Sculptures

Christo’s first permanent large-scale work, The Mastaba, will be the world’s largest sculpture and installed 160km south of the city of Abu Dhabi. The enormous project was conceived in 1977 and will be made from 410.000 multi-colored barrels to form a mosaic of bright colors, echoing Islamic architecture. A mastaba is a type of ancient Egyptian tomb and a familiar shape to the people of the region, and will become larger than any pyramid.

It will take about 30 months of construction work to create thee 150m high, 225m and 300m wide sculpture. The top of The Mastaba will be a horizontal surface 127m wide and 225m deep. Through a long planning period it’s possible to raise the entire structure on rails to its final position in about 3 to 4 days. The estimated cost is 340.000.000US$.

> As usual, the Mastaba is extensively documented here on the artist’s site

Photo #1 by By Wolfgang Volz

After Franz West we follow up with another well-known Austrian artist, Erwin Wurm. Since the late 1990s he is working on his on-going One Minute Sculpture series in which he or others pose with everyday objects, often within an art space.

The One Minute Sculptures redefine the concept of sculpture into one of dynamic act rather than static object. Wurm’s sculptures are wrought from the human body, choreographed into absurd, witty and often perilous, relationships with objects of everyday life – a man lying squeezed under a Barcelona chair, a banana peeping out of a man’s trousers, a man balancing two bottles of detergent on his toes, or two men balancing brief cases between their knees and chests. One Minute Sculptures can happen anywhere, anytime: on a street, at home, in a hotel. Riven with a sense of imminent failure, each sculpture exists for barely a minute, before gravity triumphs, everything collapses, and the only thing to remain is a video or, in this case, a photograph.

A One Minute Sculpture could be called a sculptural variant of situation comedy because they unleash a similar effect: usually funny, often embarrassing, occasionally flowing with pathos.

In his book The Artist Who Swallowed the World (Hatje Cantz) Wurm said: I am interested in the everyday life. All the materials that surrounded me could be useful, as well as the objects, topics involved in contemporary society. My work speaks about the whole entity of a human being: the physical, the spiritual, the psychological and the political.

Wurm is also credited for inspiring the video Can’t Stop of Red Hot Chili Peppers which got +32.000.000 views on YouTube..

Right now 18 of Wurm’s photographs are on display at Open Eye Gallery in Liverpool (UK). Erwin Wurm: One Minute Sculptures runs to September 2.

Following our best-of of Wurm’s One Minute Sculptures: