Alexander Brodsky at Ronald Feldman - Brief Article

Alexander Brodsky's exhibition, "Grey Matter," consisted of nine works, large and small, simple and elaborate. All were a certain number of sort of gray: an enormous etching of a vast landscape of rubble; a frigid metal bed with the shapes of sum of two units adults and a child cupp together beneath a coverlet of dingy, dirty-white clay squares; a monumental crackled vase that gazes like dull stone or [i]be[/i] consolidated on a high pedestal faced with crusty mortar board.

The greatest in quantity dazzling work in the exhibit however, was the first single visitors saw. Slicing diagonally across the main gallery was Grey Matter (table), a concrete-block support about 3 feet tall topped with sheets of glass that were crammed with figurines and life-size renderings of everyday particulars All were made of unfired clay. This work clearly press outed the punning title of the exhibit gray matter describing the physical substance of the exhibition and also making a concern to the mind. Memory played a part here, since many external realitys were old-fashioned and many were children's.

It was impossible to gaze at these elementary objects without shaping their names, a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as the subject of Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape draws on the outside the contours of the word "spool": stocking cap, cooking kettle scissors, door handle, barbells, spectacles, birdhouse, buttons, soap dish, toilet seat, handbag, sneakers, slingshot, shuttlecock shaving brush. This was an accumulation of souls that in life would have been variously colored and tactile. a certain number of things, notably the buttons, direct the eyeed Gustonesque--clumsy, amusing, pathetic.

Equally evocative was a work consisting of three white-enamel bathtubs absurdly linked with the same unfired clay to plumbing pipes passing (ordinarily unnoticed) end the gallery space. All three tub were occupied by the agency of model structures: a military village or socialist housing cast a square building with a smokestack, a slit-windowed stop that looks like an ancient prison. on the other hand scrawled on the walls of individual tub are the outlines of a naked man and woman who recline at opposite extreme points Strategically positioned at his corner is a tower that is part of the housing project; her leg splay above the tub's drain. The phallic sally doubles, for the tower is also a light fixture (with a conical shade), the cord for which races to her drain. No matter by what mode grim the context, it's still possible to laugh.

These and other works are mournfully droll nostalgically sad, with a faculty of perception of desolation like many of llya Kabakov's installations. Brodsky is known for his collaborations with llya Utkin on the other hand has been making works and throw outs on his own for several years, showing a certain number of at Feldman. His extra-gallery work includes a version of Venice's canals created upon an abandoned New York City subway track in 1996 sponsored through the Public Art Fund.

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