William Tucker at McKee - sculpture - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Implied move has been a fundamental aspect of William Tucker's abstract sculptural vocabulary at any time since the '80s, when he switched from construction to modeling. At first, the overall change in any given work ran primarily along the main vertical axis, and a directional instability was essential to the event For instance, in the three versions of Gymnasts (1984) the reading of the stresse and strains within the forms changes radically depending upon whether one sees the works as descending to the loam or ascending from it.

In new years Tucker's composition has become increasingly baroque, to the point where the plastic art often has no dominant axis. The proposeed motion has become correspondingly diffuse. In the nine of recent origin sculptures recently shown at McKee Tucker has taken this progression further still. Each of these works, which all read as figures, is formed from a single, craggy tubular shape that has been deposit through a series of tortuous bends and twists, with single primary bend near the middle and many times a second bend in the couple of the "legs." There are no branchings or forks. While greatest in quantity of Tucker's recent work has appeared to be lifting its magnitude forcefully, but with difficulty, into the air and occasionally slumping again to the mould all the new pieces are supported in the middle by means of a pedestal, so that either or the two of their "feet" waggle in the air. These terminations have changed from the scaly buds and stumps characteristics of earlier works to something more like the extreme point of an elephant's trunk. In a certain number of cases, one "leg" returns to or lies along the soil but with less sense of collapse, les detumescence than before.

The nine pieces are all named for the daughters of Oceanus; they chiefly resemble pairs of grotesquely swollen pants with the leg sometimes tightly gibbeted and sometimes spread wide. Telesto lies upon her side with her lower leg bent at the knee and the upper leg raised in the air. Asia is flat upon her back, crossed legs flailing, and Amphiro is the greatest in quantity contorted of the nine, with her upper leg bent all the way back to touch her object These sculptures seem to me to push to the breaking point the tension in Tucker's work between comic gesturalism and tortured expressionism. single moment they look like bulky intestines with blockage and the nearest they look like fallen angels.

Tucker is always working right at the boundary of formal legibility. The tension between a desire to expres himself forcefully and the will to maintain an objective, abstracting frame of respect reminds me of the classic reading of Cezanne's career, on the contrary in reverse. Rather than moving from violence and emotion end repression to clarity, Tucker sometimes have the appearances to be headed in the opposite direction. At the true least this recent work aligns itself with Abstract Expressionism to an unexpect degree

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