Timothy Woodman at Tibor de Nagy - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Timothy Woodman has drawn out addressed himself to a point in dispute that has intrigued relief sculptors [i]or[/i] part of to the other the ages: how to compres three-dimensional space and facts in a shallow pictorial format. His solution is distinctive. The 46-year-old artist divide [i]or[/i] sever s and contours sheet aluminum into flat or bent figurative shapes, joining the several pieces with rivets into representational relief pictures, many of them without definite moulds Then he puts a painterly brush to each piece, further unifying the works, which can race from a diminutive 20 through 20 by 6 inches to a relatively epic 48 through 17 by 11 inches. He places off his figures and percepts with illusionistic modeling as well as shadows cast through unspecified sources of light.

Woodman's goal strike one as beings to be to capture contemporary Americans in the act of living the good--and, ofttimes the sporting--lives to which in the way that many of us have become accustomed. Many of his novel reliefs depict group scenes, like as Running, an overhead view of figures upon a treadmill. Handball shows sum of two units young male opponents with their backs to us (we at no time see anything so psychologically powerful as a face); they are all grit and grace, positioned differently in space with no sod under their feet. The work features dully luscious shades of pink and fulvous for the T-shirts of the players and, for the wall, palest, cloudiest azure The airborne ball is showed by a highly functional rivet. Woodman's querulous profitable humor toward his subjects is felt smooth more strongly in a relief depicting a woman who fishes in her purse for a coin before making a phone call, or in single that captures a blue-suited businessman with a briefcase walking away from us upon the street. Our lives are lived in the pursuit of happiness, Woodman strike one as beings to be saying--and perhaps solitary in the pursuit,

In Harness Racing, six cutout dealer in horsess and their horses are posited in three-dimensional relation to each other within a space that appear to bes all the more flattened because of the 4-foot height of the piece. completely through the show, perspectives are vertiginous, the viewpoint greatest in quantity often from above at a abrupt diagonal. It's esthetically sophisticated drollery in technique and content alike. Still, for the pair Woodman and the viewer, this is serious frolic While one doesn't deny Woodman the trickily dimensional integrity of his work, it should also be said that he is a much-better-than-competent lyricist in his paint handling and color faculty of perception bringing to them a simultaneous profundity and gloss reminiscent of Alex Katz at his greatest in quantity urbanely poetic. Undoubtedly the greatest in quantity tantalizing aspect of Woodman's work is its faculty of perception of the eternal in the trice What we have in these works is in like manner many imperturbable seconds out of a small in number temporarily exalted lives. It is in their fathomless physical sentience that their spirit, and the art, lies.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group