Sculpture Roundup in Chelsea

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There was a lot of good sculpture in Chelsea this month, more that I can write about in individual posts, so this is a collection of exhibitions that I saw, liked and photographed. This post is more show than tell, but I have slipped in some info from press releases and, quelle surprise, a few opinions.
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Jaume Plensa

In the Midst of Dreams, Galerie Lelong, through October 24

Working with true subjects, Plensa then altered their faces for these illuminated cast-resin heads so that race and/or gender are indeterminate

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Below: Serenity in proportionally altered, laser-cut stone
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Rebecca Warren

Feelings, Matthew Marks Gallery (22nd St.), through October 24

Warren presents the female form--in plaster, unfired clay, painted bronze or welded steel--in a range of expression from figuration to abstraction, and with an attitude that swings from humorous to aggressive. She's in thorough control of her metier, but to be honest, with all those materials and points of view, this feels more like a group show. And is it me, or does this piece seem to channel R. Crumb?

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Linda Stein

Women of Valor, Flomenhaft Gallery, through October 24

Stein focused on armor and superheroes in this two-artist show (with painter Jaune Quick-To-See Smith). You probably can't see it without a detail, but the surface is swathed in laser-print copies of Wonder Woman cartoons--a totemic expression of power and protection

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David Kennedy Cutler
No More Right Now Forever, Derek Eller Gallery, Through October 24

Views above and below, with sculptures barely visible: Clear plexiglass sheets heat-molded with the impression of the artist's body



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Vincent Fecteau
New Sculpture, Matthew Marks Gallery (24th St.), through October 24
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For these fluid forms I thought felt, but no. They're painted papier mache. What's more, they all began over the armature of a semi-inflated beach ball. I'm reading from the press release now: "The works have similar looking curves because of their shared beginnings, however each piece has been worked into an entirely new form."
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Nancy Graves
Nancy Graves, Ameringer/McEnery/Yohe, through October 24



The late sculptor, known for large-scale welded forms that referenced animal life (her famous camels) and a jungle of botanical life, is here represented by an installation of small polychromed bronze sculptures from the 1980s
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From the press release: "During these years, Graves used bronze casting to create elements from a variety of organic and manufactured items, which she then arranged, welded together, and painted with rich and colorful patinas."

My favorite, below: Wax Works VII, 1987, bronze with baked enamel, 10 x 17.5 x 14.5 inches



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Andy Yoder
Man Cave, Winkleman Gallery, through October 24



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From the guy who brought you the 10-foot licorice wingtip shoe comes a show that subverts the idea of masculinity, of what makes guy things guy things. I'm not sure the fur life preserver and gilded bowling pin make the point as much as his rose-covered garage door or lead crystal hubcaps, but in the process he also forces one to question what makes flowers and lead crystal girl things).

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Type A
Ruled, Goff + Rosenthal, through October 17
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Type A is Adam Ames and Andrew Bordwin. The piece you're seeing is a gallery installation of 2000 plumb bobs, which occupy so much of the space that you have to flatten yourself against the wall to get past it. I'm not sure I would have been so drawn to the work if it hadn't been for the collaboration of the sun.

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The strong afternoon light created a staccato rhythym via shadows that hit the floor in sharp perpendicular to the plumbs, below. I'll have to revisit the installation on a cloudy day and let you know

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Anselm Reyle

Monochrome Age, Gagosian, through October 24

I didn't respond to most of the work in this show. I found it too big, too shiny, too full of itself. But I did like the work above, a modular relief (possibly of pressed or cast steel) modulated from behind with changing lights. I managed to get two shots before the guards rushed over to say "No pictures."

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Anish Kapoor in New York

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Anish Kapoor at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, through August 15. Reflection and distortion challenge your spatial perceptions, so you back up, edge forward, circle around and repeat, engaged by the illusion and the reality of the massive forms before you

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I first saw Anish Kapoor’s work in 1990 at the Venice Biennale. He was representing Britain, and his work filled that country’s “pavilion,” a small building that consists of gallery rooms. (Each represented country has a building of its own design that remains permanently on the ground of the Giardini, the gardens, where the Biennale is set.) There were a number of sculptures, abstract forms of human scale.

Looking at my photographs from the exhibition reminds me that there was a room of carved stone blocks, about three feet in any direction, with voids of various sizes in their centers, so that as you peered in you didn’t know just how deep or shallow the negative space was. There was a disc the diameter of an armspan covered in midnight blue pigment; you couldn’t tell if it was concave or convex and you didn’t want to get too close because of the powdered pigment on its surface. And there were piles of that same midnight blue pigment; looking at these I remember thinking, “Yves Klein at a spice market.”

I’d never heard of this artist, but I responded to the simplicity and materiality of his work. Since then I’ve encountered his work, as I'm sure you have, with increasing frequency. The surfaces are always interesting; and more than most dimensional work, his forms challenge your spatial perceptions of dimension and direction.

These concerns continue in two recent exhibitions at the Barbara Gladstone galleries in New York City. Red predominated in Gladstone’s 24th Street “flagship” space (the show is now closed); reflection and distortion in the 21st Street space, where the show remains on view until August 15.

Anish Kapoor at Barbara Gladstone. My shot of the installation is above, showing Drip, Double Corner, and in the foreground, Bloodstick. All are resin and paint

A gallery shot of Bloodstick is below, where you get a better sense of the color and of the scale, some 401.57 inches--a little over 33 feet long

Read my whole report, A Tale of Two Cities: Anish Kapoor in Boston and New York, at the ARTtistics blog.

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A New Gig

Past, Present, Future, a retrospective of Anish Kapoor's work at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, up through September 7. This is the topic of my first post for ARTtistics

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Today I begin a new gig as contributor to a new blog, ARTtistics. My fellow bloggers on the site are Lenny Campello and Bill Gusky, both known for their wide-ranging interests and good writing. We three have been given a mandate to write about whatever want. How cool is that? Lenny, based in the D.C. area, and Bill, in Connecticut, have been at it for the past month already.

ARTtistics is sponsored by the art moving and storage company, Mind’s Eye. I admit, I had some initial doubts—I don’t want to compromise my writing—but I appreciate that an art-related business is interested in sponsoring art writing. It’s a nice switch from companies that make money from the art community but never give back. And the freedom to write about what interests me is, well, just like blogging on my own blog, which will continue here as usual.

I will contribute two posts a month to ARTtistics, and I already have ideas lined up through the end of the year. By the way, see that little blue-barred widget on the sidebar, right? It's an index to current ARTtistics article. Use it to see what's there, and just click to access the post.

OK, that's it for the hard sell. Now on to the story, a teaser of which is below:

A Tale of Two Cities: Anish Kapoor in Boston and New York

Overview #2: The distortion of perception is a Kapoor hallmark, and part of the pleasure of viewing his work. The man in the picture is Nicholas Baume, curator of the exhibition and chief curator of the ICA. Both images are from a slideshow on the New York Times website

Although you’ll know a Kapoor sculpture when you see it, describing one does not come close to reflecting what Kapoor sculpture is. A sculpture by Anish Kapoor is monumental, yet it pulls you in close. It defines and reflects space; yet it suggests the topography and orifices of the body. It’s concave; it’s convex. It’s hard and smooth; it’s soft and powdery; it's shiny, translucent, opaque, gooey. The materialty of the forms defines both what’s there and what’s not. Like the blind men describing an elephant by touch, Kapoor’s sculpture is all those things. And more. And less. Read more here

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El Anatsui at Jack Shainman

Fading Scroll, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 88 x 472 inches

I have given up trying to cover gallery shows while they’re still up. That’s the job of a paid journalist. My reportage is typically presented after the fact, and until my twin clones are perfected, that’s probably the way it will remain.

So here we are at the Jack Shainman Gallery on 20th Street at the end of January. The show is El Anatsui’s "Zebra Crossing." God, I love this work: large, fluid expanses that hang slightly away from the wall, occasionally bulging or sagging as they yield their great weight to gravity.

Detail below

Zebra Crossing III, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 61 x 107 inches

Detail below

The work embodies some lovely dualities. There’s an underlying geometry to the structure. Strips of metal—the aluminum wrapping from the neck of liquor bottles—are pierced and held together with twisted wire, row-on-row, but the overall effect is one of fluidity and organic growth. The patterns are textile-like in their structure, like Ghanian kente cloth, but sculptural in their presence. The work is made of junk, but the light shimmers sublimely across the surface. And of course there’s the metaphor of transcendence. It took the labels from a damn lot of devil water to make this celestially beautiful work.

Area B, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 155 x 236 inches

You can call this work sculpture, tapestry or painting, and any description would be correct.

El Anatsui is a professor of sculpture at the University of Nigeria, so perhaps sculpture is the word he would use. But the relative flatness of the surface suggests painting. Think, for instance, of the gilding and drape of Klimt. And the structure does suggest tapestry. Are you familiar with the work of Colombian-born artist Olga de Amaral, whose large scale tapestries are painted and gilded? See both below.

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Above, Klimt: Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, 1907, oil on canvas with gold and silver gilding, now at the Neue Gallery, New York City; The Kiss

Below: Olga de Amaral, Cesta Lunar, fiber, gold leaf, acrylic

More El Anatsui: Takari in Black, 2007, aluminum and copper wire, 60 x 76 inches. This one is my favorite. I particularly like the coolness of the silvery hue, and the organic geometry of the composition.

Detail below

In case you’re interested, the prices ranged from $250,000 for the smaller works, such as the one above, to $500,000 for the big one that opened the post And every single one on the gallery list had a red dot. A sante!

(Un)Familiar Territory: Martin Puryear at MoMA

Click here for FAIR FACTOR: Report from Miami

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Atrium view of Martin Puryear at MoMA: Desire, 1981, with Ladder for Booker T. Washington in the background

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Below: view of the sixth-floor installation at MoMA

Years ago, I had a dream in which I took an elevator to the top floor of a tall building. When the elevator opened, it was into a small square room with floor-to-ceiling windows on all four sides looking out to a pitch-black night dotted here and there with lights. Inside the room there were several raised pools of water that flowed into other pools, everything connected and flowing, serene and quiet. Upon waking, I recognized that the dream was a gift from my unconscious, a tranquil vessel in which to immerse myself whenever the waking world presses too crazily or stressfully against me.

I’m telling you this because walking into the sixth floor of MoMA during the Martin Puryear exhibition I experienced something similar. Instead of walking into my own personal dream, however, I felt as if I had just entered the collective unconscious of humanity. The forms were more or less recognizable—nests, wheels, vessels, tools, even animals and humans—and the materials, mostly vines and wood, were natural and familiar, but the formal relationships were unusual, dreamlike, otherworldly. I knew this place, but I didn't. Each seemingly recognizable object yielded something completely new and unknown. And the experience of being among the sculptures was reassuring, even if the work tugged uncomfortably from time to time at odd little strings in the unconscious.

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.Above left and right: Brunhilde, 1998-2000, and Old Mole, 1985

.Below: Deadeye, 2002

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In his blog In it For Life, my buddy Tim McFarlane describes his experience of the exhibition as "tantalizingly close to what we know in our world but just different enough to exist on another plane altogether." Yes, yes. I’m not alone in my perceptions.

I’d like to think that anyone from any culture could walk into that room and have a response similar to the ones Tim and I had. The work, after all, comes from an artist who has lived a fully engaged life on different parts of the planet and who, with academic training and a contemporary sensibility, connects to the preindustrial, even the tribal, with his handmade sculpture. His is craft grafted to art (or vice versa), the hand everywhere present, intuition stitched seamlessly to the idea of use, the unconscious made tangible.

Here are Puryear's own words from 2007 which appeared on a wall text in the atrium:

"I value the referential quality of art, the fact that a work can allude to things or states of being without in any way representing them. The ideas that give rise to a work can be quite diffuse, so I would describe my usual working process as a kind of distillation--trying to make coherence out of things that can seem contradictory. But coherence is not the same as resolution. The most interesting art for me retains a flickering quality, where opposed ideas can be held in tense coexistence."

are from the atrium, where photographhy was pe

Atrium view of Martin Puryear. The big wheel of Desire is in the foreground. And I love the poetry of how a sliver of Matisse's Danse is visible in the window above the work. (I never liked this atrium until now.)

Above and below: Ladder for Booker T. Washington. Specific information about each work is on the MoMa website, link at bottom

When you see this exhibition, certainly in person but even in pictures, it's clear that no recently minted 25-year-old MFA recipient could have created work with as much refined vision and raw power. These sculptures issue not from youth and accademia but from a lifetime of experience, where they were cultivated and constructed. So props to artists at midcareer, whether they're as celebrated as Puryear or appreciated by only a devoted few.

Happy New Year--and success to artists all.

Click onto the MoMA site for more images and excerpts from the catalog essays.

Click here for Jame Kalm's guerrilla video of the Puryear show (via Shark Forum)

Serra and Stella: Big Boys in Big Spaces

Click here for The Artist as Curator, updated with pictures and review

There’s a unique experience to be had in New York right now. Two big-name sculptors are showing big work in big spaces. Richard Serra is at the Modern; Frank Stella is at the Met. The museums' large indoor galleries are not enough to contain the enormous metal sculptures, so both artists have the primo outdoor space as well.

Serra’s solid steel sculptures (Intersection 2, above) stake a muscular claim on cubic space, yet they’re also about the interior spaces they define. Stella’s sculptures (Memantra, below) are so open, you see their positive and negative spaces as a whole. One’s a bodybuilder, the other a dancer.

At MoMA: View of the Sculpture Garden and Serra's Intersection 2

Serra in the Garden at MoMA

The images in this post are of Serra’s work in the sculpture garden because it’s what I could photograph (no picture taking allowed inside), but my comments are also informed by the installation of the large works on the upper floors.

In the Sculpture Garden, above and below: Views of Intersection 2 from opposite vantage points

With their curved and torqued planes, Serra’s sculptures are physically as well as visually compelling: part cavern, part vessel (as in ship, basin, silo), part funhouse. Each sculpture simultaneously closes in, opens out, sucks you down and lifts you up. I’m not overstating here. I felt a heady mix of vertigo, claustrophobia, levitation, and a kind of stoned giddiness. And mystery. Unless you see the work from an elevated viewpoint, you don’t know how large it is or exactly what its shape and proportions are. Like love, you plunge in and see where it goes, trusting you won’t get lost or crushed in the process.

And speaking of getting crushed, one sculpture on the second floor, Torqued Torus Inversion, resembled the bow of a ship—or the blade of a leviathan knife. To stand between it and the wall, which was maybe ten feet away, gives you a visceral understanding of the overused phrase, "between a rock and a hard place." But maybe that’s the funhouse part of it. It won’t really press forward and mash you into tartare. It won’t, right?

Curvilinear layers, set within the geometry of the museum

There’s also a lot of energy around the work. Maybe it’s all that iron and rust—connections to magnetism and hemoglobin. These are formidably visceral works. Sure physics and brute force were needed to make them, but the thoughts that resonated for me were earth, blood, womb. Hmm. Richard Serra as Earth Mother?Because it was hot the day I went to the museum, I waited until later in the afternoon to enter the garden where Intersection 2 and Torqued Ellipse IV were installed. The works feel just as enormous outdoors as they are indoors. With daylight, the surfaces of the work are more compelling, all scraped and pocked and surprisingly subtle in coloration (more on this, next post). Experiencing the work in MoMA’s courtyard was the physical equivalent of a mystery wrapped in an enigma: you’re surrounded by a large enclosure, which is itself surrounded by a large enclosure.

By the time I entered the sculpture garden, the crowds has thinned and the day had cooled considerably. There was no touching the work, of course. But the sculpture did something unexpected. All the heat that the metal had absorbed during the day was emanating from the surface as I walked around and through the work. So though I couldn’t touch the sculpture, it reached out and touched me.

Unexpected warmth at the end of the day
Images above: views of Intersection 2, 1992-93
Images below: Torqued Ellipse IV, 1998

More info, with pics, captions and comments by the artist: http://moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra/flash.html

Stella on the Roof
"The roof" is the Met's al fresco gallery, a glorious space to see art and nature and marvel at both.

Before I made my way there, I stopped into the large first-floor gallery for Painting Into Architecture where a couple dozen of Stella’s paintings, sculptures and architectural maquettes were on exhibition. Two views from Painting Into Architecture, a survey of Stella's work from the Sixties to the present

I was able to shoot the two images above before a guard came over and told me to stop. The larger works were too big for the space—true, too, of Serra’s sculptures in MoMA’s galleries—and all that Stella color and patterning, really did make it feel like a funhouse. I have always been a fan of his more minimal, geometric paintings, so I threaded my way through the crowded installation to see works like Sunapee II.

Frank Stella, Sunapee II, 1966, oil on canvas, 127.5 x 120 x 4 inchesMetropolitan Museum of Art




Frank Stella Severinda, 1995, mixed media on fiberglass, 9' 10" x 27'. 7" x 12' Photo by Steven Sloman, New York © 2007

Then I escaped to the roof.

My response to Stella’s work is more visual, less visceral than to Serra’s. And except for the occasion of these dual shows, I wouldn’t think to write about them in the same piece.

Chinese Pavilion, 2007, carbon epoxy composite; 14' 9.5" x 33' 8.5" x 30' 3.5"

In particular I responded to a large, open black piece, Chinese Pavilion, that seems to have wafted onto supporting pylons. In bits of overheard conversation, I picked up words like, "Darth Vader," "spaceship," and "skeletal grasshopper." To me the piece suggested nothing so much as a large cloud, though "pavilion" in the title suggests a more architectural intent. I like this open sculpture as much for its shadows as for its structure, so I wonder if I would have responded in the same way if I’d seen it indoors without the ephemeral lattice of a positive-negative of the positive-negative. Here, it appeared to float, as if we were at the altitude of, say, Machu Picchu.

Detail views of Chinese Pavilion, above and below

Chinese Pavilion demands 360-degree inspection, unlike the the other large works, Memantra and Adjoeman, which seem more oriented in one direction. Of these latter two, I preferred Memantra, which has a large fabric-like square that makes it appear poised to fly off the roof; indeed the square's torque suggests that it has begun to catch the wind. The sculpture's weight obviates any possibility of takeoff, of course, but the tension between rootedness and skywardness is exquisite. And I love how the pattern of Stella's early black paintings reasserts here as a spiralic mandala in low relief.

Memantra, 2005, stainless steel and carbon fiber; 14' x 20' 7" x15'4". Photograph above: The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Anna Marie Kellen. My photo is below.

If you follow my blog, you know I like word connections, so indulge me here for a moment: Both sculptors are Italian Americans (first-generation, I’m guessing) and their names are particularly suited to their work at the moment. Serra means greenhouse, an architecturally closed-in space that nonetheless offers views into and beyond its walls. Stella means star, and the artist’s work is right up there under a celestial canopy.

Next post: Serra on the Surface: Looking at the Sculpture with a Painter's Eye