Two Major Solos in New York
Air, light, height, with a tingle of vertigo, are what the Guggenheim Museum’s spiraling rotunda is about. Which made it a near-ideal setting for the buoyant, lucent, constellational work of Gego, who made some of the most radically beautiful sculpture of the second half of the 20th century, as seen in a five-star, five-story Guggenheim retrospective called “Gego: Measuring Infinity.”
Another exhilarating survey, “Pepón Osorio: My Beating Heart/Mi corazón latiente,” at the New Museum wasn’t, strictly speaking, a retrospective. It began in 1993, by which time the Puerto Rico-born artist had already been making significant work for some years, and it concluded with a project still in progress. But it captured him at creative high tide in five more-is-more environments of a kind that continue to make him, in a post-multiculturalist, identity-smoothing, melting-pot art world, an insistently anti-assimilationist voice.