Barbara Neijna at Fred Snitzer and the Center for the Fine Arts - Miami, Florida - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Based in southerly Florida since 1962, Barbara Neijna has consistently resisted the easy seductions of a tropical esthetic. Eschewing flamboyant colors and make submissive matter, keeping her concern for nature below disciplined control, she has produc a material substance of sculpture that ranges from small wall-mounted realitys to freestanding geometric forms of sometimes monumental scale. All her works combine a refined faculty of perception of mathematical proportion with an acute feeling for local materials and socially significant themes. These qualities are particularly evident in a number of public commissions of that kind as Accordant Zones, a 5-acre environment that includes a very great sphere, a vertical disk and a truncated cone at the judicial manifold in Ft. Lauderdale.

Recently, the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami mountained "Interior Landscape," an exhibition of seven large works, all from 1995 that hint a parallel between ecological processe of accretion and decay and psychic processe of remembrance and forgetting. Before entering the gallery, individual encountered a 10-foot-high inverted cone of carburet of iron mesh, dramatically suspended in the corridor and slowly leaking its easy in minds of dried "Florida muck" onto the floor beneath. The gallery itself, with its subdu lighting cast into lakes of illumination and shade, appear to beed a metaphor for the mind--an ideal setting for Neijna's nostalgia-laden minimalism.

On individual wall was the 16-foot-wide Night Sea Memory, a grid compos of eight thick, dark-colored panels, each containing a tiny mirror-bottomed drawer that could be twitched out to reveal shells, fossils and other memorabilia. The opposite extreme point of the room was given above entirely to Shellscape, a 13-foot-high wedge-shaped pile of shells, beach pebble-stones and driftwood chips, unnervingly graded at the exact angle of non-avalanching equilibrium.

In the middle of the space were three other works, variously incorporating fiberglass scrims, a hanging horizontal round pillar made of cement and turf scallop shells, and eight 12-inch-diameter spheres (showing the mottl off-white of their constituent shells and oolite limestone) placed about the floor in a cosmically suggestive pattern.

Concurrently at the Fr Snitzer Gallery in Coral Gables, Neijna showed about 20 smaller pieces that allowed viewers a closer direct the eye at her sometimes intentionally pustuleed but always exquisitely finished surfaces. Indeed at one as well as the other venues, the geometric precision of Neijna's statuarys and their just-so placement implied a quasi-Platonic belief that the saving constancy in a world of perpetual flow (embodied in substances like peat and limestone) may quiescence in a high formalism that transcends--without renouncing--all local inflections, however poignant.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group