Now on Display
Magdalena Abakanowicz's 95 Figures stand in diagonal rows, like bronze sentinels, on the second floor of the Museum of Art in Fort Lauderdale. The human-sized sculptures provoke a heavy sense of foreboding. Some take a step; others are static; they're all headless and armless. The work is easy to appreciate for its size, the precision of the figures' placement, and its ability to draw a visceral reaction. The urge to climb in and stand among the figures, to be amid the crowd and absorb the mob's purpose, is almost irresistible. At the same time, the work provides no pleasure or enjoyment. There are five other pieces displayed with the figures. One at the end of the hall leading to the exhibit, The Second Never Seen Figure on Beam with Wheels, is looming and unique, a perfect counterpoint to the crowd. (Through October 30 at the Museum of Art, One E. Las Olas Blvd., Fort Lauderdale. Call 954-525-5500.)
"Christo and Jeanne-Claude: The Würth Museum Collection": The works of Christo and his wife/collaborator, Jeanne-Claude -- notably their projects of wrapped monumental structures -- must be seen in context. They manifest much of their sublimeness through the ephemeral and temporary nature of their existence. This show of 65 collages, drawings, photographs, and scale models from the Würth Museum Collection will hardly provide viewers with the profound aesthetic experience of seeing the real, finished installations. But what this exhibit can do is display compelling documentation of the technical requirements and processes that eventually lead to the completion of their ambitious projects, from their Wrapped Coast in Little Bay, Australia, to their most recent project, The Gates (7,500 saffron fabric panels suspended from frames that snaked throughout the pathways in New York's Central Park). (Through June 26 at Bass Museum of Art, 2121 Park Ave., Miami Beach. Call 305-673-7530.)
Google Rudolf Bauer and you'll discover two things: He was a German-born abstractionist, and he's compared frequently to Russian painter Vasily Kandinsky. True, Bauer and Kandinsky abstracted their subjects in that same, soft, there-but-not-there style impressionists used on landscapes, with a shake of cubism thrown in for good measure. But the Boca Raton Museum of Art has gone where the Internet goes only if you look really hard. It has dug up an amazing collection of Bauer's early drawings and prints, created when he worked on German humor magazines in the 1920s and '30s. Bauer's drawings look as if they could have been New Yorker covers except they're so continental. In Man with Cigarette, the smoking man is hoarding the cigarette in the way only Europeans do. The fashions are extreme -- pointy, tight, and embellished far beyond their American flapper cousins in the '20s -- and the women are too perfect. Bauer was clever. His involvement in magazines honed his social commentary, and his drawings range from observations, rendered in gouache, of couples walking to pure caricature. Depictions of upper-class women making out raunchily with their gentleman like they were stable hands or performing a nighttime wash-up are wicked, like twisted Gibson Girls. If Bauer were going to caricature you, you'd want to cover your plump thighs. The exhibit is near-perfect in layout, traveling from his expressionist period, where the flavor of society at the time almost mocked itself, through his cubist transformation to the futurist abstractionist he finally became. As depictions of reality, some of the nudes displayed at the end of the exhibit look no better than what a novice might create in Figure Drawing 101. But they showed Bauer as a man whose hand must always have been sketching, and they're not disappointing. Instead, they're like ingenious credits at the end of a movie: not imposing but too good to step away from quickly. (Through June 19 at the Boca Raton Museum of Art, 501 Plaza Real, Mizner Park, Boca Raton. Call 561-392-2500.)
Robert Rauschenberg: Considered a central figure in late-20th-century art, Rauschenberg is also a long-time resident of Captiva Island, Florida. His recent work has begun to reflect distinctively local input: gators, punchy shadows, pink and green. His move to water-based media, inspired by safety and environmental concerns, forced his palette into a gentler range of intensity. This makes his new works more pleasant to look at than the saturated images he became known for, but the oomph has gone out of them as well. They're fun and lighthearted (the man is famous for being the same), but they seem to want for more resolution and gravitas. (Through July 3 at the Miami Art Museum, 101 W. Flagler St., Miami. Call 305-375-3000.)
The creatures in "Anne Chu," at the Museum of Contemporary Art, are simultaneously alien and familiar, fascinating and repellent. Chu, who was born in New York in 1959 to Chinese émigré parents, freely fuses past and present with her work. There are clear-as-a-bell echoes of Chinese funerary figures, medieval European sculptures, and marionettes, and yet Chu's creations are unmistakably contemporary. The exhibition features roughly three dozen sculptures and about 20 watercolors. Curator Bonnie Clearwater has given them great expanses of space -- the entire museum, in fact -- so the works have plenty of breathing room. Two relatively small pieces even have the whole Pavilion Gallery, which is separate from the rest of the museum, to themselves. The strategic use of space is especially striking in the two installations in the Pavilion Gallery. For House with Bamboo Trees and Court Lady (1999), Chu combines an ornate ceramic figure four to five feet tall with a small bronze house on the floor about two feet away. It's a jarring juxtaposition, until you take into consideration that the artist is intentionally toying with our spatial perceptions. There's a similar yin-yang dynamic in play among many of Chu's other pieces in the main MOCA galleries. The Bear (2002) is a surprisingly evocative sculpture that touches on a great many aspects of the complicated relationship between human beings and bears. Chu continues her explorations of duality in other works and other media. (Through July 3 at Museum of Contemporary Art, Joan Lehman Bldg., 770 NE 125th St., North Miami.)
