another eye opens

Two sculptures by Greek artist Savvas Christodoulides — (left) “It Was All He Could Do to Keep from Crying” and “I Have Got Something to Say to You (Girl with Bubblegum)”

Peruvian photographer Edi Hirose is my kind of guy — he likes photographing urban ruins…

and he made a series of pictures of cemeteries, not all of them as monumental as this Gursky-like piece

Icelandic conceptual artist Hreinn Fridfinnsson is very handsome but his work was too twee for my taste

Venezuelan artist Eduardo Gil was a revelation to me — this spiral installation featured a series of newspaper front pages from the last century and a half that add up to “A Brief History of the End of War”

Then there was this tongue-in-cheek installation with a dozen or so mattresses

I was also fascinated by the large billboard/mural installations by a German artist who calls himself Kriwet

Among the handful of American artists was Elaine Reichek, some of whose embroidered works I’d seen before at the Whitney Biennial

and Moyra Davey (Canadian born, lives in New York), a woman after my own heart who photographs her shelves full of books and LPs

But the major discovery for me was a Brazilian artist named Arthur Bispo do Rosario, who got the largest amount of floor space and number of pieces in the biennial

Given his circumstances, his output was extraordinary. He made all kinds of embroidered tapestries, sculptures, and Rauschenberg-like constructions. This was one of my favorites.