Gary Kuehn at Margarete Roeder - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Gary Kuehn's fiendishly simple installation consisted of three roughly congruent made of wood sculptures, each composed of a trio of heavy limbs arranged in a pinwheel and lifted not on the floor by wooden obstructs One sculpture is taken intact from nature, its stalk and forking branches providing the template for the other sum of two units A second is assembled from three separate limbs, which roughly match the original in size and shape. The final statuary is made from three enormous beams of milled lumber. All are heavily coated with graphite, which causes a certain ambiguity about their mass - they look at once leaden and vacant - and also lends them a moody metallic glint.

However physically prepossessing, these plastic arts can be accounted for by dint of a fairly schematic conceptual formulation: together, they fabricate a continuum between nature and industry, serendipity and art, and, to the expansion that the graphite allies them with drawings, two-dimensional design and volumetric form. in the way that schematic is their governing premise, and for a like reason spiritually suggestive is that premise's expression in all those multiplying triads, that its contemplation (especially in this season of Mondrian) in a short time engenders a kind of mystic hum

But that make a buzzing sound is just background music. There is, after all, a tree to be seen in this forest - or, more specifically, a tree's fork Lest the viewer miss the association, Kuehn has named each statuary The Sex of Heavenly Bodies. He borrowed the admittedly irresistible title from an essay by means of Claude Levi-Strauss, but gave it a little twist that changed the anthropologist's quick cross-cultural overlook of gender designations for the orb of day and the moon ("The Sex of the Heavenly Bodies," in the original) to a speculative visual inquiry on astral eroticism. That is to say, Kuehn's adjustment leavens the work with knowing humor-but also an innocent kind of metrical composition In wordplay and sculpture alike, he dismisses the quaintly reliable a whole s of structuralist thought, embracing instead all manner of animal and mineral attraction in describing relations between the ideal and the real.

These three reductive still complex sculptures show Kuehn to have advance more or less full circle from his formal, reductive, still highly allusive sculptures of the early and mid-'60s, which were followed by means of a long digression into figurative and assemblage-based work. The material part and its urges were not absent from the start, however sublimated in arrowed fiberglass mattresses and molten geometries. As manual gesturing the body's impulses also appeared in a series of seven small graphic works upon view in the gallery's back field Scratched into wet acrylic laid upon graphite-coated Plexiglas, these new "Gesture Project" drawings are compressed and delicate. Some of the images are misty, a certain number of torrential, some incised on flesh-colored clods others on pale greens and amethystines but they are all, like the plastic art as intimate as they are abstract.

COPYRIGHT 1996 Brant Publications, Inc.

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