Columbus Museum of Art » Late Modernism & Contemporary

Large Head

scott — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:30:02 +0000

Stephen Balkenhol continues a long German tradition of woodcarving that dates from the Middle Ages. He chooses woods that have knots and irregularities and that are pale in color, soft, and easily cut. He works on unseasoned wood, which will develop serendipitous cracks as it cures, and he uses a chisel to make evenly distributed cuts that will catch the light, like brushstrokes on a painting. The artist identifies himself with Everyman, here raised on a pedestal to monumental status.

Intermediate Model for the Arch

scott — Wed, 21 Mar 2012 18:12:04 +0000

Alexander Calder is among the most important sculptors of the twentieth century. He is best known for his invention of playful hanging sculptures called Mobiles. Calder has also created stabiles, which are stationary sculptures, often whimsical, inspired by organic forms. The works can be found in public and private settings throughout the world. This Stabile is a scale model (one-to-five) of Arch, whose full-sized version is painted steel, fifty-two feet high. It is balanced on one “toe” on a site at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York.

Isola di San Giacomo in Palude

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:43:02 +0000

In the late 1990s, renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly and his team traveled to Finland, Ireland, and Mexico to work with glass masters in these countries. Together they created a series of huge, colored “chandeliers,” which were eventually hung over the canals of Venice in a spectacular display. The nickname of this piece, “End of the Day,” alludes to a practice in Renaissance glassmaking in Venice, in which at the end of the day a glassblower melted all his scraps together and made one last piece that contained bits of all the other pieces he had made that day. This bold, colorful “end of the day” epitomizes Chihuly’s flamboyant style and includes 322 pieces of blown glass from each of the other “chandeliers” in the series.

Spirit

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:38:58 +0000

Spirit is Mel Chin’s meditation on the “tall-grass prairie,” a lost American landscape that once extended from Minnesota to Texas. The monumental barrel—nine feet in diameter and seemingly precariously balanced—recalls the casks that were so essential to American frontier life for transporting and storing grains, pork, oil, liquor, and gunpowder. By the late nineteenth century, the increasing demands of agriculture, commerce, and industry had set in motion an inexorable reshaping of the landscape. This process resulted in the reduction of the indigenous ecosystem to, in Chin’s words, “a thin green line,” rep- resented here by the rope that is woven of endangered grasses, which he received permission to cut and use.

Pantalon d’Equinoxe

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:35:49 +0000

This sculpture belongs to the series of drawings and sculptures Dubuffet called L’hourloupe, a term he coined to suggest “something rumbling and threatening with tragic overtones.” The series originated from doodles in red and blue ballpoint pen, some of which the artist eventually translated into three-dimensional forms like this one. Dubuffet regarded the strange objects in this series as apparitions or emissaries from another world—hence the mysterious title of this object, “equinox pants.” All of them include organic and abstract shapes, meandering lines and stripes, commercial inks, and artificial materials.

Hare on Ball and Claw

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:31:25 +0000

Barry Flanagan’s sculpture ingeniously mixes fantasy, satire, and realism. It is his response to the Minimalist sculpture of his contemporaries with its severe geometric abstraction. Flanagan has said he can express more about human nature by using a hare than a human figure, because a hare has such expressive potential—in the ears, for example. Here, a monumental hare stands on a ball-and-claw, his pose triumphant but not threatening. The ball-and-claw is a design motif from eighteenth- century British and American furniture. It is a symbol of craftsmanship and tradition but also of the hare as the perennial prey of animals with claws—a reminder of the sometimes violent cycle of life and death.

Reflection

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:28:10 +0000

Ann Hamilton has a long history of using herself and the human figure generally in her art as a means of exploring perceptual awareness. This series of inkjet prints grew out of the installation that Hamilton created when she represented the United States at the Venice Biennale of 1999. For that project, she built a textured glass wall in front of the American pavilion, making the pavilion look as if it were reflected in water. For this series, Hamilton had herself photographed reflected in the stacks of glass before they were used for the wall, every five minutes over the course of an hour, beginning at noon. The twelve digitally produced prints that resulted are “reflective” of the watery environment in which they were created.

The Family of Man: Figure 2, Ancestor II

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:25:30 +0000

One of Britain’s leading abstract sculptors, Barbara Hepworth, along with her friend Henry Moore, worked primarily with reductive, organic shapes and pierced forms. She professed an emotional affinity with nature, believing that humanity is renewed through contemplation of nature. Hepworth worked always on a human scale and made frequent references in her work to such things as shells, crystals, rocks, and the rhythm of the sea.

Hot Summer Circle

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:22:51 +0000

As part of the “quiet revolution” in sculpture in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Richard Long and fellow student Barry Flanagan began to expand the idea of what sculpture could be. Long’s land art, for which he is the leading British exponent, has shared Minimalism’s rigorous intellectual approach to form but has rejected the factory-engineered qualities of much of Minimalist art. Instead, Long has embraced natural materials—especially stones—as well as a simpler visual grammar of lines and circles, exemplified here by three concentric circles of stones.

Three Piece Reclining Figure: Draped

scott — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 23:17:30 +0000

The reclining figure was one of Henry Moore’s favorite subjects. In this version of the theme, Moore has created a form composed of several separate pieces to convey serenity and repose. The reclining figures are not mere exercises in abstraction; rather, they symbolize larger themes, such as the relationships of humans to the organic and inorganic natural world. Here, the form flows smoothly from one part to another to recreate the effect of long exposure to wind or water on mountains or on stone or bone.