Daniel Wiener | Sculpture, Painting and Other Projects » Sculptors

Angelika Arendt

danielwiener — Fri, 16 Sep 2011 21:29:43 +0000

How does it feel to discover a compatriot – a fellow-traveler who has been a stranger up until this point – whose work speaks in similar thoughts as your own? After a friend sent me a link to the work of Angelika Arendt, I was a bit astounded by the similarities found between her sculpture and mine. We have been making sculpture in different countries (she lives and works in Germany), at different times (I am older than her), and with different influences. But yet, our two bodies of work echo one another in distinct ways. And so there are two of us, and presumably many more, who blend and form color in 3D, who accumulate blobs, dots and cross-sections to create many small hidden places, shaping compound curves into biomorphic structures.

Frau, a recent piece from 2011, starts simply from a cylindrical base of coin-sized concentric circles of blue, olive and bronze, and then shifts upward to flowing stripes of colored dots in greens, blue-greens, browns and rust. After the soothing steady rhythms of its middle, the upper portion of the sculpture comes to a gentle crescendo. It is a vertical, but without the thrusting, imposing definitiveness of a tower or a totem. It looks as if it could support weight, but not like the static sturdiness of a pillar or a beam, but as a growing thing. The shapely undulations of its surface could hide muscle and bone, its strength derived from the their dynamic tension, their responsiveness to its particular shape and weight.

While one can easily imagine the sculpture’s growth originating from a mysterious force of nature, it is also satisfying to notice how obviously it is made by a human hand. We can imagine the artist rolling out coils of color, slicing, placing, molding, stretching, building up from bottom to top. It is this paradox of magic/mystery created by such a methodical, obvious and gimmick-free craft that makes the work so exciting.

What I am drawn to most in her work is what happens to be least like mine. While starting from the same level of complexity, her work is unified with a holistic template and forms a composed beauty. Maybe this is the reward of having two perspectives on the same landscape: the two views multiply and increase their individual value. Viewers can feel the distinctions—can feel the difference between harmony and dissonance, viscerally, specifically, through contrast. And for the artist, as it is in my case, it leads to questions—why do I make sculptures this way rather than another? What is this tendency to make sculptures on the verge of aesthetically falling apart? Is it habit? Is it a false avant-gardism? Or is it a real, meaningful, necessary impulse? What if I tried something different, tried for more unity, instead of falling again for an easy dissonance? Of course there is no answer to these questions here. Such inquiries can only be worked out when absorbed into the work of the studio.

Even though Arendt remains a stranger to me, I like having the company, one that lives in another country but inhabits the same territory. It feels as if we are having a conversation that progresses at the pace of sculpture, slow with long gaps of silence between finished thoughts.

To see more of her work, visit her website.

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