Daniel Wiener | Sculpture, Painting and Other Projects » Sculptors

Better Than Sculpture

danielwiener — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 14:00:08 +0000

Sometimes “engineering” is better than run-of-the-mill contemporary sculpture. The marble machine depicted below is created by xeniaguy2 (I could not find out his real name) and it looks like it is something he is making as a “hobby”. Even though it is easily described as a “Rube Goldberg” contraption, it displays a sense of grace and a power of invention that enthralls, intensifying its significance beyond its apparent means.

Also, it is an example of “open source” in the real three dimensional world, since it lays bare its mechanisms and their principles. It shows you how it is doing what it is doing and teaches along the way. (Ironically much of our created environment, before the digital, is “open source”).

So, three cheers for xeniaguy2. I look forward to more installments, as he continues this amazing project.

Kathy Butterly

danielwiener — Wed, 20 May 2009 15:38:08 +0000

I went to Kathy Butterly’s studio last night and saw her new work in process. She makes intensely considered, worked and reworked sculptures. Her sculpture has the crystalline beauty of a finely crafted object of an ancient aristorcrac as well as fleshy folds of human bodies – a being, a world, a universe that you can hold in the palm of your hand.

The new work I saw in process will possibly be simpler than the past work with less high-keyed colors. The shape of one, that had just begun, reminded me of Umberto Boccioni’s – Unique Forms of Continuity (1913), an interesting connection since her work mostly veers away from the corpus of high modernism and does not highlight the values of speed, as did the Futurists.

Seeing the work also reaffirmed in me the idea that artists should work the way that they work – small or large, refined or rough, no matter – but absolutely no second guessing, no trend-spotting, no “right” way.

I also saw some incredible new paintings by her husband, Tom Burkhardt. I have planned to concentrate on sculptors only in this section of the site, but wanted to mention him because his paintings are so good. Both of them show at Tibor de Nagy.

Kathy Butterly

Folkert de Jong

danielwiener — Tue, 19 May 2009 14:06:03 +0000

Wow.

YouTube

New York Times Review of Wadsworth Show

At James Cohan Gallery

Hilary Harnischfeger

danielwiener — Tue, 19 May 2009 02:09:00 +0000

I first saw Hilary Harnischfeger‘s work at the Marie Sharpe Walsh foundation studios a couple of years ago and felt an immediate affinity with her work. Her sculpture is built intuitively, incrementally, creates patterns, yet breaks them and has a palpable presence but is not operatically assertive – all qualities that I find compelling. She now has a show at Rachel Uffner. I find I am more drawn to the 3 sculptures than to the sculptural wall works. The wall works are painting-like and while the play of the materials is inventive the composition remains in the realm of cubism/constructivism/hard-edge-abstraction while the sculptures have associative suggestion of momentarily unnameable things – vessels, artifacts, crystallized fragments of utilitarian objects from another world. Both the sculptures and the wall works are beautiful and rugged and tell the story of their making – laminating colored sheets of paper, slicing them, casting concrete parts, repeating and reworking until all the parts suggestively connect.

The photographs don’t do the work justice. The detail and the work’s visceral qualities are flattened, softened, lost.

Lee Boroson

danielwiener — Fri, 15 May 2009 22:02:17 +0000

I had a very inspiring studio visit with Lee Boroson – at his studio. There’s an intriguing combination of engineering, speculative thought and playfulness in his work. He is working on a diverse group of pieces that might appear disconnected to some but are united through his visual language. Nice to see a body of work that holds together organically rather than with rigid ideology or stale formal limitations.

Here is a picture of a sculpture from 2006.

View more of his work at http://www.sarameltzergallery.com/artist.php?artist=boroson