The bright creaminess of what was the newly completed sculpture has darkened to a warm sepia, almost as if it were an aged photograph of the thing in addition to the thing itself. The expansion is expanded, in the past. It is done.
SPLTS: Two shows of new works by Rita Ackermann - Hauser & Wirth, New York martincid.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from martincid.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
No One Thing, the current exhibition at Hauser & Wirth is, in effect, an estate sale. The seven items—all steel, all painted, 1961–64—are among the last in circulation. One is very glad to see them but does not mistake this group for a historical exhibition, which in various aspects it pretends to be. In its miscellaneous heterogeneity however, the exhibition is as close to the lost fields as we may ever get, and by a special power of the artist—nothing short of magic, he is present here as if in person. A busy-minded formalist who said, “I don’t edit;” these works were checked off Smith’s exhaustive must-do list. Some are almost unbearably personal.