Sculpture Garden...

Comment

Comment by Resident Curator on January 19, 2014 at 3:38pm

Curator’s Comments: 

 

I find these Sculpture Garden Conversations to be stylishly elegant, and largely understated.  The hefty black shapes provide a Modernist edge but these works never fully venture into Minimalism, with multiple design elements joining in visual dialogue.  This first piece may be a little more austere than some of the others, but I find it also has quite a bit of humor.  The tiny circles resting on top and spiraling off of the curved dominant dark form are rather whimsical by comparison.  The softer graphite marks are also a nice contrast to the sleek acrylic forms, offering a vague association with hand worked imagery versus mechanical creation and evolution.  I also like that the work has an implied exterior border, with shapes being cropped off selectively along the sides of the piece and open white expanse defining the remainder of the pictorial boundary. The small bits of color set the compositional pieces apart to a certain degree, but in general I find the addition of color more persuasive as part of the whole  in Sculpture Garden Conversations  6 and 7.  In these later explorations, the colors are melodiously composed to balance off of the black and white components, and appear more fluidly integrated.  The sixth composition in particular has an enjoyable dynamic happening between the two unequal halves of the space.  I see an aesthetic exchange between the flat spaces and texturally drawn linear marks, as well as an interesting contrast between stark black and muted dark color.  Overall these are eye candy for the serious and well composed.