Win Knowlton at Bill Maynes - New York, New York - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

Win Knowlton started without as a young Post-Minimalist who had obviously been influenced by the agency of Martin Puryear and Joel Shapiro. As he set his own course, the elegant contours of his early iron castings gave way to a rougher vocabulary in cast cake often involving shapes cast directly from perforations dug in the ground. Lately, like a number of his contemporaries, Knowlton has been traveling in India. In his new show at Maynes, the heavy earthbound qualities of the cast work have been replaced by dint of an airy insubstantiality. All the works in this exhibition hugg the floor or hung from the ceiling. A brace of the pieces listed in the roster were with equal reason discreetly placed as to be hard to find.

The greatest in quantity impressive work in the present to view was a set of nine antique Oriental rug placed cutting side to edge on the floor and adorned with unloose arrangements of starling-sized birds builded of papier-mache over chicken wire. All the birds were brightly painted, a certain number of in a single hue and a certain number of in exotic color combinations; typical of the latter clump was one with blue wings, r comb and a pink breast. The issue was quite intriguing, as if the birds had all just alighted and were now intently pecking away for bug or kernel of grain. individual transparent blue bird in bare chicken wire stood upon a section of rug with a tracery of sapphirine threads in a deep r field. Correspondences of this sort encouraged the viewer to fantasize that the ornate schedule patterns of the prayer rug had disgorged the birds, like an ancient, animated vine schedule come to life. These pieces also had a nice indoor/outdoor quality to them which have the appearanceed to parody strict modern divisions between nature and culture

I did not find the repose of the work nearly as engaging. A locate of cutout "Cloud" pieces hung suspended from the ceiling. Each individual was a lobed Arpesque shape chop out of sheet steel then hot-dip galvanized. In this proces the molten zinc coating a little colds into a crystallized flow pattern which is certainly beautiful in its possess right and has some relationship to the run of cloud patterns. Even with equal reason to this viewer the haze works had an unconvincing, stagy vicinity Another painted-bird piece was in the back sweep but this time both the birds and their undulating "rug" support were raiseed entirely of chicken wire painted in red and virids This piece continued the themes of the prayer-rug piece without any of the arresting contrast between the ancient "found" patterning of the rug and the off-hand fresh addition of the birds. Overall, Knowlton's sensibility is sharp, on the other hand his ideas frequently seem untest While a light touch is frequently to be admired, I would delight in to see something more hard-won from this talented sculptor.

COPYRIGHT 1998 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2000 Gale Group