Kelly Crow talks about Ireland’s representative to the Venice Biennale, Corban Walker, in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Walker, 43 years old, is a minimalist sculptor and installation artist known for layering and stacking industrial materials like glass, steel and LED lights into precarious arrangements. Often, his pieces like “Grid Stack” (2007) and “Float” (2008) evoke an oversized game of pick-up sticks or Jenga, where dozens of seagreen sheets of glass are placed into piles that partially overlap each other yet sit slightly askew.
Like Sol LeWitt or Josef Albers, Mr. Walker’s work plays with mathematical rules of order and scale, yet he occasionally adds a distinctive twist by making pieces that stand around his own height of 1.2 meters. When basketball star Shaquille O’Neal invited him to submit a piece this spring for a show, “Size Does Matter,” at New York’s Flag Art Foundation, Mr. Walker papered the foundation’s stairwell with vinyl-glass rectangles that corresponded to the two men’s respective heights. Mr. O’Neal stands just over 2.1 meters tall.
[…] Other artists tapped to participate so far include Christian Boltanski for France, Mike Nelson for Britain, Karla Black for Scotland, Sigalit Landau for Israel and Hany Armanious for Australia
Choosing Talent (WSJ)