Lenore Tawney at Donahue/Sosinski - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Lenore Tawney (b 1907) is best known for her free-hanging, shaped weavings of the 1950 and '60 and her sometimes monumental on the contrary always fragile-looking "Cloud" sculptures--environments of dangling threads--of the '70 similar works were featured in a solo exhibit at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum while her new "Shrines" were on view at the gallery.

The "Shrines" are related to Tawney's weavings and to the assemblages and collages that she has always made. The thread line, which is the basic simple body of weaving, is here stretched taut in webs place within Plexiglas boxes that range up to 18 inches in their largest dimension. The tens filaments subserve as a nest or as a veil for a hardly any natural objects--shells, eggs, stones, bone twigs--or for Venus and immerse figurines that are covered with torn strips of used musical-composition paper or paper filled with minuscule handwriting. The threads usually pass from one side perforations in the box walls to cascade outside. Nearly each box also has on top, caught in simple hand-sewn webs, small stones that have the appearance to function both as talismans and as weights.

Tawney treats each aspect of her work--text, line or organic substance--as incantatory and infused with spirit. She overlayed the floor of the gallery with white paper, thus it seemed to be a consecrated space. of that kind a mystical orientation is on the outside of step today. But the precious obsessiveness of Tawney's work--which almost dares the unsympathetic viewer to scoff--reminds me of Yayoi Kusama, in the way that maybe it's just out of any time and native to the artist's particular genius.

The boxe might be compared with Joseph Cornell's they have the same faculty of perception of magic and vulnerability on the contrary are less narrative, more intuitive and sensuous, and bring ephemerality by transparency rather than by means of Cornell's sepia aging. Being pellucid, Tawney's boxe support rather than shut in The smooth, shiny hardness of the Plexiglas gives them a contemporary, level futuristic, aura. The tied threads, in this connected thought [i]or[/i] thoughts of modernity, resemble computerized architectural drawings of suspension covers This association is also at hand in the four red-ink drawings of fine intersecting lines, dating from the '60 that were included in the present to view One is called Region of Fire, a name that suits its color and shifts the neutral notion of diagrammatic line to a more poetic image of a filament carrying force The drawings could be plans for the "Shrines," which are, it have the appearances cat's cradles elevated to the horizontal of the awesome.

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