Art Capsules

False Start: Onlookers can discover rubberneck heaven while gawking at Timothy Buwalda’s large oil-on-canvas paintings of car wrecks. His sumptuous works depict crumpled Beemers and Toyotas, their mangled husks rendered in excruciatingly clear detail. Buwalda’s powerful paintings swing between photorealism and abstraction, delivering a haymaker. — Carlos Suarez De Jesus…

Come into the Garden

If you find yourself shadowboxing with dull-date depression, or feel like hell week at the office has sapped the bliss from your bones, its high time you discovered a funky slice of Oz at the end of that broken brick road. Tonight at 8:00, chuck those soul-withering blues onto the…

Art Capsules

False Start: Onlookers can discover rubberneck heaven while gawking at Timothy Buwalda’s large oil-on-canvas paintings of car wrecks. His sumptuous works depict crumpled Beemers and Toyotas, their mangled husks rendered in excruciatingly clear detail. Buwalda’s powerful paintings swing between photorealism and abstraction, delivering a haymaker. — Carlos Suarez De Jesus…

Fevered Fantasia

Karen Kilimnik has a knack for picking at the scab of the national psyche. Beneath the deceptively saccharine blush of her artistic production oozes celebrity-addled America’s obsession with Page Six gossip, fashion glossies, purple tabloid prose, and Court TV. Her complex work reminds us why a has-been wreck like O.J…

Indigenous Ingenuity

The inexorable tides of change are the mother tongue of María Magdalena Campos-Pons’s evocative work. Throughout her career, the Afro-Cuban artist has inventively translated the ordinary materials, rituals, and traditions of life into riveting visual and sensory statements. “Everything Is Separated by Water,” opening at 10:00 a.m. at the Bass…

Art Capsules

Real Time and Under These Circumstances One Usually Loses a Shoe: Time’s passage, the preciousness of human labor, the serendipity of finding something new in the old, and the banality of daily life converge in “Real Time,” a group show featuring David Castillo’s stable of artists. In the project room,…

Ice Meets Vice

For Magnus Sigurdarson the subtropical melting pot of Miami has become a fertile conceptual stomping ground. The Icelandic artist, who has made the Magic City his home for the past three years, says the town’s fiery pulse, coupled with his dispassionate genetic wiring, helped stoke his show at the Kevin…

Sculptures in a Material World

Alas, we were crestfallen to discover that “Material Terrain: A Sculptural Exploration of Landscape & Place” — the exhibition opening tonight at 8:00 at the Lowe Art Museum — is not a probing exam of belly-button aesthetics. Instead it’s a study of the uneasy relationship between the natural and constructed…

Art Capsules

Work!: An exhibit featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and photography, “Work!” was created by the Popopstudios co-op. The show’s title stems from a colloquialism describing the futility of a pointless action. The highlight is Blue Curry’s Like Taking Sand to the Beach, a ton of sand carved out of Yamacraw…

Art Season Opens in Wynwood

At Locust Projects this past Saturday night, Diego Bianchi gleefully tinkered with his unruly installation, not unlike Rube Goldberg on the eve of destruction. Unsuspecting spectators strolling through Wynwood’s season-opening gallery walk might have felt ambushed by the Argentine artist’s psychedelic phantasmagoria, a scene even Timothy Leary would have been…

The Kooky Kaleidoscope of Karen Kilimnik

Visit the world of Karen Kilimnik and you’ll find a gothic landscape cloaked in a gossamer web of memory. At times her work can be like the contents of one of those kitschy wind-up jewelry boxes in which a ballerina pirouettes to “Swan Lake,” or akin to the pages of…

Itching for Art?

If you haven’t gotten your art flu shots, hurry! A rash of new shows and spaces suggests that local dealers are feverish with visions of a painting in every pot and a gallery on every block. Tonight at 7:00, at the freshly erupted Sacco Gallery (6444 Biscayne Blvd., Miami), “Ladies…

Art Capsules

Work!: An exhibit featuring paintings, sculptures, installations, videos, and photography, “Work!” was created by the Popopstudios co-op. The show’s title stems from a colloquialism describing the futility of a pointless action. The highlight is Blue Curry’s Like Taking Sand to the Beach, a ton of sand carved out of Yamacraw…

Catastrophic Kitsch

The events of September 11, 2001, seem to have become Debra Holt’s obsession. Cynics might even say she’s trying to cash in on the tragedy. Since 9/11, the artist and owner of Abba Fine Art has been squirreling away newspaper clippings, photographs, and memorabilia she associates with the event —…

Chill Out, Hotties

Softened by reality TV and central air conditioning, most South Floridians are ill-prepared for the subtropic’s searing summer temperatures. With thermometers bursting their bulbs and locals panting for relief, the Miami Beach Botanical Garden has hatched a nipple-stiffening antidote to the blistering heat. “Ice in August,” featuring the work of…

Art Capsules

Clay and Brush: The Ceramic Art of China: The Lowe’s new exhibit is a penetrating historical survey of the development of Chinese ceramics from the Neolithic period to the 21st Century. The sweeping exhibition, which unfolds chronologically, includes more than 190 objects and is divided into three sections: pottery, stoneware,…

Meeks Inherits

Despite the glint of a diamond stud in his ear, Steve Meeks emits a whiff of Sergeant Rock as he pulls on a fat cheroot outside his Borders mega-framing shop in Little Havana. The Kentucky native moved his family-run operation, which caters largely to the artist, collector, and museum trade,…

Fascist Fairy Tales

During the Cold War era, baby boomers were weaned on stories of the rosy-cheeked duo Dick and Jane, their white-bread parents, and dog Spot. But earlier in the past century, kid lit wasn’t as wholesome, as both democratic and totalitarian countries sought to introduce their bouncing bambinos to political messages…

Art Capsules

2007 Cintas Fellowship Finalists: The show features the work of Alexandre Arrechea, María Martínez-Cañas, Gean Moreno, Wilfredo Prieto, and Leyden Rodriguez-Casanova, the five finalists for the $15,000 Cintas visual arts fellowship for 2007. Martínez-Cañas is the standout amid a lot of inconsistent work and shoddy presentation. The artist, who snagged…

Pop! Go the Easels

To create his installation Like Taking Sand to the Beach, Blue Curry carved a 16-by-12-foot section of Yamacraw Beach in the Bahamas into a grid, excavated a ton of sand, and separated it into 165 labeled plastic baggies for a 5000-mile trip to Germany. There the section of beach was…

Fundraising gallery nights are a beautiful thing

Cecilia Moreno-Yaghoubi puts her money where her mouth is when it comes to creating art with a message. The Colombian-born artist uses broken dolls, old photos, beads, fabric, assorted thrift shop detritus, and found objects to convey her vision of the social, cultural, and religious ills contaminating the contemporary world…

Art Capsules

Clay and Brush: The Ceramic Art of China: The Lowe’s new exhibit is a penetrating historical survey of the development of Chinese ceramics from the Neolithic period to the 21st Century. The sweeping exhibition, which unfolds chronologically, includes more than 190 objects and is divided into three sections: pottery, stoneware,…