Since then, other major institutions have followed suit. The Metropolitan Museum of Art is showing, for the first time, its acquisition of Othello’s sculpture of an asymmetrical ladder, scaled by tools, with a meditating headless figure on top, in the current show “The Face of Life: Modern Portraits at The Met.” This fall, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington plans to reopen its renovated outdoor grounds installed with its recent purchase of the artist’s eight-foot-tall lime green rendition of a box fan.
At Art Basel this week, Othello is showing his largest multi-element tableau to date in Unlimited, a curated section of the fair featuring monumental works. “Two sides that hold truth,” co-presented by the artist’s galleries Karma and Jessica Silverman, is a deep blue, free-standing wall about 40 feet long and two feet thick; multiple rectangular cutouts at varying heights present arrangements of more than 50 ceramic, wood, stone and glass motifs, including phones, mirrors, fans and vessels.
“It’s almost like an altar,” said Othello, who is interested in how these composed objects in their niches present windows for viewers to witness themselves looking, and see others on the opposite side doing the same thing. “It’s about seeing each other through the material world and finding commonality.”
The idea of architecture as a pedestal and stage for smaller sculptures “is definitely going to be pushing what’s possible for Woody and for the market and for people’s understanding of his work,” said Karma owner Brendan Dugan, who is presenting the entire structure as one piece, in a phone interview.
The Basel installation evolved from Othello’s exhibition “coming forth by day,” up through June 28 at the Pérez Art Museum Miami, where a similar wall greets viewers and presents arranged vignettes of objects in niches.
“Woody wanted to create a space of intimacy where you walk through this hallway, almost like your grandma’s house with shelves of little artifacts,” Jennifer Inacio, the Pérez curator who organized the show, said in a phone interview. The exhibition then opens into an expansive gallery of larger sculptures and tiled wall works, where Othello used an herbal scent to infuse his tactile ceramics, a shade of ruddy vermilion for the walls and a sound element keyed to that color by a musician, designed to serve as a guided meditation.
