Michele Oka Doner placing the finishing touches on Altar II, a large-scale work on display at London’s David Gill Gallery.

Photo: Jordan Doner.  Courtesy of David Gill Gallery

With three new exhibitions concurrently, the designer and artist Michele Oka Doner reaches across the pond this spring. Her latest oeuvre is spotlighted at London’s David Gill Gallery, New York’s Neue Galerie, and Wasserman Projects in Detroit.

Over the past five decades, Oka Doner has explored nature by referencing branches, seashells, and seedpods. The works currently on view prove that she has never stopped doing so. Her multifaceted efforts run from videos to large-scale public works, sculpture, photography, drawing, furniture and functional objects, and jewelry. As if that weren‘t a wide-reaching enough roster, for the Miami City Ballet’s production of A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Doner created both set designs and costumes.

Her exhibition at David Gill celebrates her recent endeavors in lighting. Items vary from vast chandeliers to small candlesticks, all of which are cast in bronze from tree branches and presented alongside giant works on paper.

Burning Bush, one of Doner’s works on display at David Gill.

Photo: Basel Almisshal

“Once again, Michele is blurring the boundaries between sculpture and design,” says Gill, who cites her Altar II, a massive floor installation made up of swirling branches cast in bronze and sporting small white candles, as a standout. “I can’t think of another artist who is so remarkably versatile but always hews to her singular aesthetic.”

Closer to home, the Neue Galerie is gearing up for its exhibition, “Before the Fall: German and Austrian Art of the 1930s.” Opening next Thursday, the show will be complemented by Oka Doner’s somewhat surreal installation, fashioned from various vines that she coated with charcoal paint containing mica and turned into a work stretching some six feet across and four feet high.

Doner’s installation on the ceiling at the Neue Galerie.

Photo: courtesy of the Neue Galerie

“In tandem with a section devoted to landscapes, Michele has interpreted the notion of an enormous tree growing from the ceiling,” says Neue Galerie director Renée Price. “When completed, her work recalls the blackened roots of a tree as seen from below.”

Meanwhile, in Detroit, Wasserman Projects, the art space located in a former firehouse, is showcasing “Michele Oka Doner: Fluent in the Language of Dreams,” for which the artist recreated and expanded a floor installation originally composed of pebbles and shells in clay that she produced practically 40 years ago for her first solo museum show at the Detroit Institute of Arts. “Michele’s aesthetic is grounded in an exploration of natural elements,” says Gary Wasserman. Also on view are large-scale sculptures and design works, along with works on paper.

The connecting thread through each of the concurrent exhibitions is, of course, an exploration of the natural world. “Nature was my initial vocabulary, so to speak, long before words and images, and it reverberates especially in this high-tech age,” the artist tells AD PRO from her Soho loft.

As to what’s on Oka Doner’s drawing board these days? She’s making tweaks to a monumental installation of multiple cast bronze figures for an office building that opens in May, right across Saks Fifth Avenue; and an installation at Manitoga, Russell Wright’s iconic home in Garrison, New York.