‍MICHELLE LOPEZ (COMMONWEALTH AND COUNCIL, LOS ANGELES)

The gravity-denying rope sculptures in Lopez’s first show with Commonwealth and Council in LA were elegant, brutal, and defiantly human-scale. The press release for the show used the word purges to describe how these new works evacuated monumentality from legacies like Richard Serra’s. Inside the conceptual force fields these lassos created—like a reverse conjuring trick frozen in the act—I felt I was being invited to consider what this emptied space could contain. Sticking with Wild West metaphors, it’s fun to imagine a higher-dimensional roundup of ornery, way-past-their-prime macho art shibboleths and happy invisible pastures where they retire off into the sunset.

ARTFORUM