'Dawns and Dusks' at the Louise Blouin Foundation in London, is an impressive retrospective of one of the most important american female sculptor, Louise Nevelson. The retrospective, the first show of the artist in 40 years in London, gathers an array of work by one of the most influential and innovative artists in the post world war scene in the US, namely in New York, where she was based. The works of art always challenges the viewer with ambivalent structures, between the aesthetic realm of painting and the material construct of the sculpture. The assemblages presented here cross the development of a carreer that was based in the collection of urban lefthovers including street-discarded furniture, scraps of wood, refuse from factories, hat forms, patterns and moulds which were then assembled and painted, uniformizing the structure into a new collection of forms and shadows.
[ images: view of the gallery, with Untitled (1964, wood painted black, 263.5x263.5x52.1cm) and in the background, 'End of Day Nightscape' (1973, wood painted black, 281.9x421.6x16.5cm); 'Cascade VII' (1979, wood painted black, 269.2x330.2x40.6cm); detail 'Cascade VII' ]
The artist synthesized the process and the recurrent choice on black as follows:
'When I fell in love with black, it contained all colour. It wasn't a negation of colour. It was an acceptance. Because black encompasses all colours. Black is the most aristocratic colour of all. The only aristocratic colour. For me this is ultimate. You can be quiet and it contains the whole thing. There is no colour that will give you the feeling of totality. Of peace. Of greatness. Of quietness. Of excitment. I have seen things that were transformed into black that took on just greatness. I don't want to use a lesser word. Now if it does that for things I've handled, that means that the essence of it is just what you call alchemy.' Louise Nevelson
Louise Nevelson considered herself a formalist, part of the Abstract Expressionism among others like Rothko, Kooning and Reinhardt who were close friends of the female sculptor.
The monumental works here presented sometimes seem to become cabinets of curiosities, filled with every possible reality. Often overwhelming, the works stand between the painting and the sculptuere, usually hang or leaning onto the wall, they create a kind of a black void, an intersticial space that becomes full with the viewer entering the offered reality.
'End of Day Nightscape' (1973, wood painted black, 281.9x421.6x16.5cm) encapsules one of these transcending experiences that seem to swallow the viwer into another dimension, another reality, and in-between place.
'[T]he work that I do is not the matter and it isn’t the colour, [...] it adds up to the in-between place, between the material I use and the manifestation afterwards; the dawns and the dusks, the places between the land and the sea. The place of in-between means that all of this that I use—and you can put a label on it like ‘black’—is something I'm using to say something else.' Louise Nevelson
The artist seemed to resume her approach to life and to art in this willingness 'to show the world that art is everywhere'.
Labels: Abstract Expressionism, Black, Cabinets of Curiosities, Louise Blouin Foundation, Louise Nevelson
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