Works on Paper

In January 1978, when I was 28 years old, I arrived in New York City from San Diego for a five-month stay. Without a studio in which to make art, I decided to write about it. Though I had no training as a critic, I had made and thought about sculpture for a decade. Robert Smithson wrote to make way for his sculpture in the late ’60s, I knew, as had Donald Judd before him.

While doing my MFA at the University of California, San Diego, between 1972 and 1974, I’d been one of Manny Farber’s many teaching assistants. Farber painted, but was better known for film criticism. He understood movies visually rather than narratively, and recognized the radical force of R. W. Fassbinder’s and Werner Herzog’s filmmaking on first sight. The poet David Antin had been my thesis advisor, and he was talking and writing about contemporary art. My MFA classmates Martha Rosler and Allan Sekula had published criticism soon after graduating, and each had received an NEA critic’s grant. Their example pushed me along.

I wrote two reviews of 500 words and three short features and sent them to Art in America, Artforum, Art News and Arts Magazine. I received a note from Elizabeth C. Baker, the editor of Art in America, requesting that I call. I felt intimidated when we met, but she put me at ease by asking if there were artists whose shows I would like to review. I mentioned Willard Boepple, Joel Perlman, Bruce Robbins and Italo Scanga; Baker encouraged me to write about their exhibitions. I submitted copy before returning to California for the summer. She ran one of the unsolicited pieces I’d mailed in—on Lyman Kipp—in the July/August 1978 issue. The reviews we had agreed on ran in the September/October issue.

I began teaching in Philadelphia in September 1978. The following January, Baker surprised me by asking me to cover the upcoming Whitney Biennial. I accepted her unlikely offer with trepidation, because I didn’t know if I could write capably about painting. Influenced by Leon Golub’s sociological analysis of the Whitney’s painting Annuals 1950-1972 [Artforum, March 1973], I described the ’79 Biennial as a sort of trade fair for powerful Manhattan galleries. The feature came out in the March/April issue. I focused on artists for whom my words could make a difference, writing at greatest length on Martin Puryear, who wasn’t well known. I realized that criticism was advocacy, and, temperamentally, I preferred writing on artists who hadn’t been much covered. Completing the short article gave me confidence.

Later the same year I proposed a long feature about bronze casting. As an artist I recognized—before critics did—that bronze was returning as a sculptural medium of choice after 50 years of disfavor. I wrote a detailed overview of casting and then treated the 11 artists individually, writing 250 to 500 words on each, a length I’d mastered doing my first reviews. The article ran in the Summer 1980 issue.

I used a similar approach for an extended December 1982 piece I initiated about 10 sculptors, well known in the ’50s, who had faded from view in the following decades. I went to meet Reuben Nakian, Phillip Pavia and the remarkable Raoul Hague, among others. (Nine of these sculptors were included in Lisa Phillips’s exhibition “The Third Dimension” which opened two years later at the Whitney Museum.) Baker helped me believe that these time-consuming projects mattered. Writing articles, I realized, gave me access to established artists, offered a continuing education in sculpture and provided visibility.

In 1983 she asked me to write a feature on Mark di Suvero. In treating a single artist in depth, I nuanced my approach, discussing both works I admired and works which dissatisfied me. When the story ran that December readers saw a di Suvero sculpture on the cover.

In early 1985 Baker accepted my proposal for a collection of interviews with my sculptor peers; I wrote an introduction setting forth the ways our work was linked, and edited the ten tape-recorded conversations into monologues, which each artist revised and approved. While articles rarely ran ten pages, Baker spread the interviews and accompanying color pictures over 28 pages in the November 1985 issue and put Judy Pfaff’s work on the cover. I would return to this interview format twice, including roughly 20 artists each time.

From the first Baker paired me with the editor and novelist Ted Mooney. We worked together for 30 years. Both of us admired Judd’s startling ability to describe works and appreciated how his seeing supported his interpretation. Mooney had the gift of preserving my “voice” and meaning, while easing the abruptness of my prose. Baker oversaw everything; then everyone in editorial got a chance to add comments and corrections to galleys. It was Mooney’s job to balance these pushes and pulls, while preserving the work he’d already done. I looked forward to his editing. Many of his changes were so subtle that I didn’t notice them. If I felt strongly about a phrasing we would work it through.

 

I met the French sculptor Anne Rochette in New York in February 1986, and soon I proposed that we write together. She had written a little art criticism in France in the early ‘80s, and we shared a passion for looking closely at sculpture. Baker and Mooney accepted this uncommon arrangement, insisting only that during the back-and-forth of editing they would engage with but one of us. Since 1986, Anne and I have co-written almost everything we’ve published; we married in 1987. The choice of subject for almost all our articles has come from us. We rarely accepted assignments. We preferred writing features, since they allow a degree of analysis impossible in reviews, and readers remember them better. Baker let us tackle ever more complicated subjects, even though we’d moved to Paris in 1990 and could not write often, since we were juggling our studio practices and teaching jobs while rearing two daughters. When we took months, or longer, to pull together an article, her patience never flagged.

Anne and I understood that editors often saw word counts as sacrosanct, so we continually condensed our drafts. In practice, Baker never cut the texts we’d written, and Mooney never altered our meanings. Every review and article we submitted got into print; we always were paid. For long or laborious pieces we received more than scale. Baker and Mooney did shorten and rearrange the interviews we submitted; they weren’t our words and we always found it hard to adequately condense what others had said. With all interviews we ran the final versions by the artists concerned. Sometimes articles would not appear as quickly as we hoped; we came to realize that Baker held the galleys until she had space in an upcoming issue.

We remain grateful for the ways Mooney, Baker and the magazine’s editors improved our work. I rewrite obsessively, a habit aggravated when computers replaced typewriters. More than once I submitted copy, then kept revising and resubmitting it. Mooney had to carry his edits from version to version. He wasn’t vengeful when another editor might have been.

Art in America was Betsy Baker’s magazine as The New Yorker had been Harold Ross’s, and then William Shawn’s. Anne and I were privileged to write for her. We stretched to meet her standards, which ever remained just beyond our reach. We were treated wonderfully, and we always knew it.

 

Anne has more inclusive taste than I do, so we’ve covered artists I wouldn’t have written about alone; my single-mindedness has meant that we’ve hewn closely to sculpture. We avoided writing on artists we knew personally, though we sometimes became friends with people we covered. I wrote one well-paid catalogue essay in 1987 for an exhibition of cast sculpture at Moore College of Art in Philadelphia. I thought it would be easy, since I was reprising material I’d covered in my 1980 article on bronze casting, but discovered that this format came along with constraints: the expectation that I would write more favorably than objectively. I’ve stuck to criticism since.

Typically, Anne and I divided up the works we wanted to discuss and wrote individually. Then she revised my paragraphs, and I hers. I would struggle ceaselessly with the ledes and the conclusions, while Anne dealt with ideas and textual flow; she has the better feel for vocabulary, despite English being her second language. Writing jointly we spent more total hours than we would have writing alone. By the end of an edit we averaged a scant 25 words per hour.

As I got older, I found it harder to write about my peers, so three times I took on subjects that sprang from personal experience, and for which I felt uniquely suited. I wrote solo in these pieces because I needed to write in the first person singular. I’d worked as a studio assistant in ’71-’72; twenty years later I examined the subject of assistantship in a 26-page-long suite of interviews. Baker organized the January 1993 issue around my article, pairing it with a historical study of the complexities of attributing Rembrandt’s paintings given his many assistants.

In March 2000 I published an important article on the disappearance of Bill Bollinger’s oeuvre; it was the longest and most difficult text I ever wrote, and became the basis for a traveling survey of his work a decade later. And in February 2004 I explored the complicated issues surrounding the posthumous works produced by Bas Jan Ader’s estate. The magazine carefully vetted my research, which passed unchallenged when published and helped protect Ader’s sparse but crucial output.

In 2006 Anne and I undertook a series of interviews with 19 sculptors from Los Angeles. The article ran, at over 27,000 words, in November’s issue. Baker’s support determined whether a story of this length would be published. She risked more than we did. Her word was her word.

 

Over a quarter of the artists we’ve written about have died; almost all the others are still working and showing. For a number of them, our articles were their first appearance in the features section, rather than the reviews section, of an art magazine. Some of the people whom we covered at the beginnings of their careers are well known now. When I started in 1978 I did not imagine that my writing could become the part of art discourse that it has.

Print publications have been under enormous financial pressure since 2008. Mooney and Baker both left Art in America that year. I had hoped we could work together two score years, but it wasn’t to be.

Anne and I decided to create this website since very little of what we had published—around 100,000 words of criticism and 57,000 words of interviews—was available on the Internet. Art in America’s digital archive only goes back to 2010, so almost everything within this site is based on our scans of around 300 printed magazines pages, whose glossy paper and inks have aged over the decades. Benoit Pieron cleaned up the pdfs, extracted the texts, converted them into a .doc format using optical character recognition software and constructed the site. I proofread the texts.

Over the preceding decades the writer, and now blogger, Dan Nussbaum edited some of the texts before we submitted them, and several times the sculptor Joel Fisher re-ordered tangled sequences of paragraphs. Nancy Princenthal edited the Simon Starling article, which ran in February 2010, and Faye Hirsch the second feature on Bill Bollinger, which appeared in the June/July 2011 issue. After leaving the magazine, Baker still made herself available to give our pieces a read-through. Elle est sans pareil.

Suggestions and inquiries are welcomed.

 

P.S. After writing this introduction I came across an unpublished interview Joel Fisher did with me in 1985. My reasons for writing and my approach have changed little over the decades:

“I started writing about art because I was living in New York in spring ’78 and didn’t have a studio to work in. I found I could best make myself think seriously about certain works or issues by writing on them. And as a critic I had access to people who weren’t then available to me as a young sculptor. I’ve always tried to write as an advocate, making the best case possible for the work covered. I write about sculpture because it’s what most concerns me. I’m not an art critic, but a sculptor who writes on sculpture.”

Simon Starling, Making Connections

| | Art in America, February 2010, Vol. 98, N° 2, pp. 102-109 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — In his antic romps through history, Simon Starling sometimes takes chancy leaps of logic. His installations are all the more vivid, and elegant, for the risks he courts. Humor is ...
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Place Matters: Los Angeles Sculpture Today

| | Art in America, November 2006, Vol. 94, N° 10, pp. 168-191, 224 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Recent years have produced a burgeoning sculpture scene in Los Angeles, where abundant studio space, high-profile art schools and do-it-yourself confidence provide a uniquely congenial mix. Here two Paris-based ...
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Not Lost, Not Found: Bill Bollinger

| | Art in America, March 2000, Vol. 88, N° 3, pp. 104-117, 143-144 by Wade Saunders — In the late 1960s, sculptor Bill Bollinger showed with—and was routinely compared to—such other emerging artists as Richard Serra, Keith Sonnier and Bruce Nauman, all of whom admired his work. Today, 12 ...
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Pierre Huyghe at Centre Pompidou

| | Art in America, January 2014, Vol. 102, N° 1, pp. 91-92 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Fifty-one-year-old Pierre Huyghe has emerged as a major French artist. His work is smart, singular and fun. Time is both subject and medium, and his oeuvre brings T.S. Eliot’s poem ...
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Making Art, Making Artists

| | Art in America, January 1993, Vol. 81, N° 1, pp. 70-95 by Wade Saunders — In a new variant on the apprenticeship system, many artists now employ paid assistants for tasks ranging from menial labor to creative collaboration in the production of their art works. Below, comments by ...
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Art on the Fly, Bill Bollinger

| | Art in America, June/July 2011, Vol. 99, N° 6, pp. 162-171 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — [Our title for this article was Fluid Matters] Elusive in his lifetime and nearly lost to memory after his death, the Post-Minimalist sculptor Bill Bollinger is getting some belated attention ...
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Mike Kelley at Centre Pompidou

| | Art in America, October 2013, Vol 101, N° 10, pp. 167-168 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The first large-scale, posthumous museum show of Mike Kelley’s raucous work, curated by Ann Goldstein at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, is traveling east to west. The artist was involved ...
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Talking Objects: Interviews with Ten Younger Sculptors

| | Art in America, November 1985, Vol. 73, N° 11 pp. 110–137 by Wade Saunders — Over the last five years, while painting has occupied the art-world limelight, a new generation of American sculptors has been quietly reinventing the syntax of their medium. Below, one sculptor's critical assessment—and ten ...
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In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Bas Jan Ader

| | Art in America, February 2004, Vol. 92, N° 2, pp. 54-65 by Wade Saunders — When Dutch artist Bas Jan Ader was lost at sea in 1975, he left behind a slim body of mostly photo-based work. Now posthumous editions of some of these pieces are raising provocative ...
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Plain Seeing, Robert Grosvenor

| | Art in America, October 2005, Vol. 93, N° 9, pp. 138-145, 193 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Deliberate, willing to wait—he has completed just under a score of sculptures during the last 30 years—Robert Grosvenor produces perceptually exacting work that rewards unhurried looking. His largest-ever retrospective ...
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Figures of Estrangement, Thomas Schütte

| | Art in America, May 1995, Vol. 83, N° 5, pp. 102-107 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Though he is still interested in the psychology of architecture and public space, sculptor Thomas Schütte has lately given center stage in his installations to the figure. Recent museum shows ...
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Ends and Means, Tony Cragg

| | Art in America, July 1996, Vol. 84, N° 7, pp. 66–75 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — A recent show at the Centre Pompidou surveyed Tony Cragg’s prodigiously varied sculptural output. The authors consider the impact of process on Cragg’s style as well as the role of ...
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Bliss Over All, Elmar Trenkwalder

| | Art in America, November 2004, Vol. 92, N° 10, pp. 164-167 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Whether in his dense drawings or his architectonic sculptures of glazed terra-cotta, Austrian artist Elmar Trenkwalder deploys sexually referential ornament and detail in exuberant profusion. The 44-year-old Austrian sculptor and ...
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Savage Mercies, Annette Messager

| | Art in America, March 1994, Vol. 82, N° 3, pp. 78-83 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Concocted from such disparate materials as photographs, fabric and the stuffed corpses of small animals, Annette Messager’s enigmatic vignettes convey a dark ambivalence. Tenderness combines with cruelty, comfort with menace, ...
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Touch and Eye: ‘50s Sculpture

| | Art in America, December 1982, Vol. 70, N° 10, pp. 90–104, 121 by Wade Saunders — Often linked to Abstract Expressionism, the ten sculptors discussed below were relatively inconspicuous during the ’60s and ’70s. Among the traits they share are their references to both myth and nature, their ...
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At Critical Mass, Richard Serra

| | Art in America, October 1986, Vol. 74, N° 10, pp. 152-155 by Wade Saunders — Richard Serra’s recent retrospective, along with two ancillary exhibitions, showed him ever more adeptly addressing issues of light, space and energy. Since the exhibition of the thrown-lead casting Splashing and of the leaning ...
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Risk & Balance: Mark di Suvero

| | Art in America, December 1983, Vol. 71, N° 11, pp. 128-135 by Wade Saunders — Sensitive to sculptural as opposed to architectural scale, di Suvero’s best new steel pieces combine visual sweep and detail, massive size and viewer participation. This spring a sizable group of Mark di Suvero’s ...
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Hot Metal

| | Art in America, June 1980, Vol. 68, n° 6, pp. 86–95 by Wade Saunders — More and more sculptors have turned to casting in metal—particularly in bronze—motivated by a desire for permanence, a renewed interest in “touch,” even by economics. Here, an overview of present-day casting as practiced ...
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Comedic Mass, Eric Dietman

| | Art in America, December 1994, Vol. 82, N° 12, pp. 84-87 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Although he has never exhibited in the US., Erik Dietman is widely known in Europe for sculpture that is Rabelaisian in its expansive humor. Last summer, as Dietman’s career entered ...
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Freeze the Moment, Richard Baquié

| | Art in America, October 1998, Vol. 86, N° 10, pp. 122-125, 148 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — In a career cut short, French sculptor Richard Baquié brought together his twin passions— language and mechanical processes—in works that remind us again and again that time is always ...
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Portfolio: Bora Vitorac and Dragojlub Pavlov

| | Art in America, June/July 2010, Vol. 98, N° 6 pp. 146-151 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — We spent July 2009 as artists-in-residence at the Terra Center in northern Serbia. There we met Bora Vitorac and were stunned when we looked through the 2007 catalogue from a ...
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When Artists Collaborate

| | Art in America, November 2002, Vol. 90, N° 11, pp. 53-55 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The Third Hand: Collaboration in Art from Conceptualism to Postmodernism, by Charles Green, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001; 248 pages, $68.95 hardcover, $24.95 paper. In The Third Hand: Collaboration ...
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Revitalizing the Louvre

| | Art in America, June 1994, Vol. 82, N° 6, pp. 37-39 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — A decade of renovation and expansion, culminating last fall with the opening of the new Richelieu Wing, has catapulted France’s grandest museum into the 21st century. The opening of the ...
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Art Inc.: The Whitney’s 1979 Biennial

| | Art in America, March/April 1979, Vol. 67, n° 8, pp. 96-99 by Wade Saunders — This year's survey of the current scene, low on risks and surprises, was largely a confirmation of what is known. It differed from its predecessors by being organized into stylistic categories and by ...
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Liquid Forms

| | A commissioned catalogue essay for the exhibition “Bronze, Plaster, and Polyester” which was curated by Elsa Weiner Longhauser for the Goldie Paley Gallery at Moore College of Art, Philadelphia. The show was open November 6—December 12, 1987. by Wade Saunders — The exhibition “Bronze, Plaster, and Polyester” proposes ...
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Los Angeles

| | Bomb, Winter 1988, N° XXII by Wade Saunders — The Los Angeles art world is growing and changing more rapidly than at any time in its history. Even dealer attitudes are different than they were before. Top LA galleries, which for years avoided exhibiting local artists, now scramble ...
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The Far Shore

A catalogue essay for the exhibition “Atlantic Sculpture” held at Art Center College of Design, June 8 through July 11, 1987 by Wade Saunders — In this exhibition I've aimed to represent a Present in sculpture. Though not an exhaustive survey, nothing needed is missing. I chose the sculptors before ...
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Richard Deacon at Marian Goodman

| | Art in America, October 1990, Vol. 78, N° 10, pp. 201-202 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Richard Deacon is among the several British sculptors now making work consequential enough to influence others’ practice. His development of an existing tradition, his exploration of materials and construction methods, ...
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Antony Gormley at Salvatore Ala

Art in America, November 1986, Vol. 74, N° 11, p. 169 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Though Antony Gormley belongs by age and career to the so-called New British Sculptors, his work has been less visible in New York than that of Tony Cragg, Bill Woodrow, Anish Kapoor ...
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Bruno Gironcoli at Bernard Jordan

| | Art in America, June/July 2009, Vol. 97, N° 6, pp.183-184 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Bruno Gironcoli’s sculptures are unmistakable in their facture, iconography, complexity and obdurateness. Gironcoli, who was born in 1936, has been a crucial figure in Austrian art since the 70s, both as ...
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Anthony Caro at Emmerich

| | Art in America, March/April 1979, Vol. 67, N° 2, pp. 151-152 by Wade Saunders — Caro's work, which appeared effortless in the ‘60s, has begun to look facile in the ‘70s. Though he still improvises, he more often ends in the same places. There is much new to ...
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Isaac Witkin at Hamilton

| | Art in America, January 1980, Vol. 68, N° 1, p. 111 by Wade Saunders — Since World War II most sculptors have either carved/modeled/cast or welded/constructed their pieces. Isaac Witkin is one of the few artists who has done convincing work of both sorts. He recently exhibited nine ...
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William Tucker at David McKee

| | Art in America, December 1987, Vol. 75, N° 12, p. 154 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The sculptures William Tucker made in the ’60s and ’70s were in step with his published reflections about modern sculpture; reserved, they sometimes appeared more analytic than visual. Tucker trained ...
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Eric Bainbridge at Salvatore Ala

| | Art in America, October 1987, Vol. 75, N° 10, p. 183 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Issues in sculpture wax and wane. While big was often better in American sculpture of the '60s and early ’70s, by the ’80s sculptors were focusing once again on the ...
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Alison Wilding at MOMA

| | Art in America, March 1988, Vol. 76, N° 3, pp. 158-159 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Since the ’60s, contemporary sculpture has, in the main, moved toward the physically obvious. Bold and discernible styles have found favor over subtle ones; catchy materials, physical bulk and easily ...
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Cathy de Monchaux at Jennifer Flay

| | Art in America, November 1994, Vol. 82, N° 11, p. 143 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Cathy de Monchaux’s weirdly ornamental works consistently move counter to recent sculptural practice. One rarely sees sculptures propelled by drawing, yet de Monchaux’s ornate drawings yield the patterns for the ...
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Barthélémy Toguo at the Palais de Tokyo

| | Art in America, September 2005, Vol. 93, N° 8, p. 165 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Barthélémy Toguo was born in Cameroon in 1967 and studied art in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. He moved to Europe in 1993 and began exhibiting and doing performances while finishing his ...
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Michel François at Jennifer Flay

| | Art in America, June 1999, Vol. 87, N° 6, p. 129 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Forty-three-year-old Michel François, one of two artists representing Belgium at Venice this year, belongs to a loose fraternity that might be called “peripatetic sculptors of the apt gesture”—artists such as ...
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Takis at Palais de Tokyo

| | Art in America, May 2015, Vol. 103, N° 5, p. 169-170 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The sculptures of Takis (born Panayiotis Vassilakis) have waned from view over the past 20 years. Now, simultaneous exhibitions—a compact one at the Menil Collection in Houston and a comprehensive ...
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Carol Rama at Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris

| | Art in America, June/July 2015, Vol. 103, N° 6, <br />pp. 155–156 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — “The Passion According to Carol Rama” is the largest show to date of the Italian artist, with over 200 paintings, watercolors, prints and sculptures made between 1936 and 2005 ...
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Ida Applebroog at Ellen Sragow

Art in America, May/June 1979, Vol. 67, N° 3, p. 144 by Wade Saunders — Five years ago Ida Applebroog lived in Southern California and made modular sculptures. in accompanying codices she proposed alternate arrangements of the modules. You could follow her through the suggested operations until she abruptly changed ...
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Jean Dupuy at Loevenbruck

| | Art in America, May 2012, Vol. 100, N° 5, pp. 184-185 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The French octogenarian Jean Dupuy was an abstract painter until the mid-’60s, when he moved to New York and began pursuing technological and optical experiments and performance. In 1984 he ...
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Maria Nordman on Washington Boulevard, Los Angeles

| | Art in America, December 1979, Vol. 67, N° 3, pp. 119–121 by Wade Saunders — Maria Nordman has worked with natural light installations—generally temporary—for nine years. Her touch with light is sure: when she reaches for an effect she secures it. Though subtle and evanescent, her work is ...
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Judy Pfaff at Holly Solomon

| | Art in America, November 1980, Vol. 68, N° 10, pp. 135-136 by Wade Saunders — Over the past six years reviewers have labeled Judy Pfaff’s work “nervous,” “quirky,” “kooky,” “loony,” “exuberant,” “rambunctious,” “rowdy” and “zany.” These words are accurate about appearance, but inaccurate about consequence or importance—like describing ...
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Françoise Vergier at Claudine Papillon

| | Art in America, October 1991, Vol. 79, N° 10, pp. 165, 172 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — In the past five years younger American sculptors such as Maureen Connor, Robert Gober, Rona Pondick, Judith Shea and Kiki Smith have followed the lead of Louise Bourgeois and ...
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Keeping Company, Alain Kirili

| | Art in America, December 2002, Vol. 90, N° 11, pp. 65-67 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The peripatetic French sculptor Alain Kirili has divided his time between Paris and New York for almost 30 years. In New York he is best known for his works in ...
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Alain Kirili at Sonnabend

| | Art in America, March 1980, Vol. 68, N° 3, pp. 115–116 by Wade Saunders — Sculptor Alain Kirili has written well on unfashionable art. Contemporary French concerns are evident in his making art a carrier of religious and personal meanings, his exploring the psychological matrix of a work, ...
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Ariane Lopez-Huici at Gerard Delsol & Laurent Innocenzi

| Art in America, July 1993, Vol. 81, N° 7, pp. 111-112 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — While many photographers want us to look at a particular thing observed from a particular place at a particular moment, Ariane Lopez-Huici has undermined that traditional photographic trinity. She works in ...
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Wolfgang Laib at Maeght Lelong

Art in America, January 1987, Vol. 75, N° 1, p. 130 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Modern sculpture partakes more of the factory than the farm, and of culture more often than nature. Materials are generally regarded as bearers of information, rather than as substances in themselves, and ...
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Gert Verhoeven at Galerie Nelson

| | Art in America, October 2000, Vol. 88, N° 10, pp. 179-180 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Gert Verhoeven is a 36-year-old Belgian artist whose sculptures, drawings and videotapes share seemingly uninhibited vocabularies and esthetic casualness. Some artists use informality to emphasize their idiosyncratic seeing of the ...
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Giuseppe Gabellone at Emmanuel Perrotin

| | Art in America, April 2009, Vol. 97, N° 4, pp. 158-160 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — The 35-year-old Italian sculptor Giuseppe Gabellone consistently confounds expectations. He often fashions pieces in surprising ways, for example press-molding a series of ukiyo-e-inspired reliefs in a silvery substance that turns ...
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Vito Acconci at International with Monument

| | Art in America, June 1987, Vol. 75, N° 6, pp. 151-152 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Though the three brand-new sculptures Vito Acconci showed lacked the provocative edge of his best works, they made up for it by their playful expansiveness. Each piece could as well ...
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Bruce Robbins at Truman

| | Art in America, September/October 1978, Vol. 66, N° 5, pp. 115-116 by Wade Saunders — Bruce Robbins exhibited painted seesaws this past season. Crowded inside the gallery were 29 same-sized sculptures. In each, a loosely engineered board rests on a functional fulcrum. The rich-looking boards measure 84 inches ...
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Mel Kendrick at John Weber

| | Art in America, Summer 1983, Vol. 71, N° 6, pp. 155-156 by Wade Saunders — Since 1974, Mel Kendrick’s sculpture has moved from the mentally to the visually analytic, from being thought out to being seen through. For him ideas have increasingly come forward during the construction of ...
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Timothy Woodman at Robert Freidus

Art in America, May/June 1979, Vol. 67, N° 3, p. 148 by Wade Saunders — Almost everything is right about the painted figurative wall reliefs that Timothy Woodman makes. They are fresh, smart, adventuresome and serious. The sculptures—generally layers of curving surfaces—are simply, quickly made: he snips out thin aluminum ...
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Tom Butter at Grace Borgenicht

| | Art in America, April 1983, Vol. 71, N° 4, p. 177 by Wade Saunders — Modern sculpture is roughly divisible into open, horizontal, linear/ planar constructions and closed, vertical, solid-seeming monoliths. Most constructions are abstract; most monoliths are figurative or biomorphic in character. Tom Butter’s sculpture straddles this ...
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Willard Boepple at Acquavella
Joel Perlman at Emmerich

| | Art in America, September/October 1978, Vol. 66, N° 5, pp. 123-124 by Wade Saunders — In 1972 Willard Boepple and Joel Perlman were included in “Five Sculptors From Bennington,” a group show at Emmerich’s downtown gallery heralding a third generation of artists working with welded steel. Their sculpture ...
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Michael Todd at the Oakland Museum

| | Art in America, November/December 1978, Vol. 66, N° 6, p. 159 by Wade Saunders — In the ten years he has made sculpture on the West Coast, Michael Todd has exchanged a jaunty, axial geometry for an open calligraphic format, and has introduced mangled material and foundry spill ...
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Martin Silverman at Hamilton

| | Art in America, March 1982, Vol. 70, N° 3, pp. 144–145 by Wade Saunders — For four years, Martin Silverman has shown figurative sculptures that comment on both contemporary city life and current art. To keep his cast bronze figures from being too quickly read or too easily ...
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Helene Agofroy at Le Quartier, Quimper, France

| | Art in America, March 1998, Vol. 86, N° 3, pp. 112-113 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Little interested in mass or volume, Helene Agofroy isn’t a traditional sculptor. Using mundane materials and mostly planar images, including video, she makes multi-element works in which geography, local lore, ...
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Italo Scanga at the Clocktower

| | Art in America, September/October 1978, Vol. 66, N° 5, p. 126 by Wade Saunders — Italo Scanga's exhibition at the Clocktower spanned work of eight years. The installation suggested a European church with side chapels, and you had to kneel to see some of the pieces properly. Included ...
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Walter Obholzer at Thaddaeus Ropac

Art in America, July 1991, Vol. 79, N° 7, p. 129 by Wade Saunders & Anne Rochette — Paris seems poised to become the commercial center for contemporary art in Europe, with nearly double the galleries of any rival city. Karsten Greve from Cologne and Thaddaeus Ropac from Salzburg have ...
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Lyman Kipp at Sculpture Now

| | Art in America, July/August 1978, Vol. 66, N° 4, p. 113 by Wade Saunders — Lyman Kipp avoids welding whenever possible. He bolts his sculptures together. Bolts join parallel surfaces. They necessitate plane-to-plane rather than plane-to-edge connections, foster the gradual not the radical articulation of space, and make ...
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Guy de Cointet at Robert Freidus Gallery

Unpublished, and not edited; written May 1978 for Arts Magazine by Wade Saunders — Upon receiving my unsolicited texts, Richard Martin, the editor of Arts Magazine, invited me to his office in April 1978 and asked if there was a current exhibition I wished to review. I proposed that of ...
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Bryan Hunt at Blum/Helman

Unpublished, and not edited; written April/May 1978 for Art News by Wade Saunders — Upon receiving my unsolicited texts, Donald Goddard, the editor of Art News, invited me to his office in April 1978 and asked if there were current exhibitions I wished to review. I proposed those of Bryan ...
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Charles Ginnever at Max Hutchinson Gallery

Unpublished, and not edited; written April/May 1978 for Art News by Wade Saunders — Upon receiving my unsolicited texts, Donald Goddard, the editor of Art News, invited me to his office in April 1978 and asked if there were current exhibitions I wished to review. I proposed those of Bryan ...
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Kim MacConnel at Holly Solomon Gallery

Unpublished, and not edited; written February/March 1978 by Wade Saunders — Kim MacConnel had two kinds of work in his recent exhibition. He showed five constructions made with voile and other fabrics, supported by bamboo, trimmed with ribbons, joined with thread. They are sumptuous, an obvious development of his previous ...
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Ed McGowin at Brooks Jackson Gallery Iolas

Unpublished, and not edited; written March/April 1978 by Wade Saunders — Ed McGowin is a fabulist. He tells stories, maybe lies. Country Western Narrative is his eighth large-scale installation of a living space. In it he combines paintings, sculpture and a song. The song will be the prologue to an ...
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Barbara Zucker at Robert Miller Gallery

Unpublished, and not edited; written March 1978 by Wade Saunders — “Life party-colour'd, half pleasure, half care.” Matthew Prior Marcel Duchamp said he loved our bridges and our plumbing. Both sustain Manhattan, but it is the plumbing or piping that predominates. Pipes and conduits appear in galleries, lofts, apartments and ...
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Barbara Zucker at Robert Miller Gallery, (short version)

Unpublished, and not edited; written March 1978 by Wade Saunders — Barbara Zucker makes pipes hiss, rattle, and steam visually while she plays with the action of color in metal sculpture and with the many references ruffles make. Her composition is frontal or radial; non-assertive, non-systemic. Her fabrication is expeditious, ...
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Marilynn Gelfman-Pereira at
O. K. Harris Works of Art

Unpublished, and not edited; written March/April 1978 by Wade Saunders — Marilynn Gelfman-Pereira's sculptures are shown in individual Plexiglas boxes. They are thus marked as fragile, having to be protected from our hands, even from our breath. Sculpture is rarely helped by touch: skin acids and oils can damage stone, ...
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Marilynn Gelfman-Pereira at
O. K. Harris Works of Art,
(short version)

Unpublished, and not edited; written March/April 1978 by Wade Saunders — Marilynn Gelfman-Pereira's sculptures derive from the binary oppositions inhering in the relation between metal and wood: chemically formed against biochemically formed, relatively strong against relatively weak, preternaturally straight against approximately straight, applied geometry against native geometry, the fabricated against ...
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