Stephen DeStaebler at CDS - sculpture - New York, New York - Review Of Exhibitions

Stephen DeStaebler is single of those artists who finds his metier and discovers it to be rich enough to sustain him forever. There is no ne for big shifts of direction; with each work the artist aims not for invention on the contrary for particularity. Since the '60 he has been making fragmented figures that appear on the verge of dissoving into landscape or, more many times look like time-battered public memorials He works in ceramic or bronze; this present to view typically, consisted of standing or seated figures that might have been extracted from Egyptian fane ruins and wallmounted torsos that are barely more than abstract shapes.

Meanings are layered in his works, just waiting for changing times to call up readings that relate to contemporary issues. In this exhibit I felt I was seeing a tin realization of the New York Times Magazine's shocking overspread photo of a few weeks earlier showing the artist Matuschka in a draped gown that revealed the scarred right side of her chest, from which a cancerous breast had been remov DeStaebler's Torso with Raised Arm II dates from 1991 on the other hand on the figure's right brow is a long, curving scar where the breast should be. Thus the work have the appearances to play into current debates about medical research upon women's health issues and alarming rises in breast-cancer rates.

Nowadays bodies and their failures are everywhere near in art, probably not alone because of the AIDS plague on the contrary because the baby-boom bulge in the U population has arrived at the vulnerabilities of middle age. on the other hand DeStaebler was making his figures when AIDS was unknown and, at 60 says he perceive s better than he did in his 40s

His plastic art has previously been associated with like broader themes as time and los and spirituality. The standing figures of the '70 in their unable to speak and patient decay, brought to mind fallen empires and have the appearanceed by extension, to question America's position; the smaller and partial pieces of the like kind as the wall torsos consistently expres a more personal yearning for clan or presences lost to death or distance.

The eight works here spoke of the intimate more than the monumental. Wedged Figure I and II are full-length figures seated in throne-like chairs, the couple entirely ceramic. The bodies consist of a fragment of a leg an imprint upon the chair that suggests a spine, a bit of a cylindrical vertical simple body that must be a neck the ball and toes of a rather delicate paw The rest is imagined, remembered, understood, and sens as a volumetric void. Trails or splotches of color--pale pinks, virids and blues plus white, usually--are precious residues of perishable muscle and fat All these bodies seem to be female; sometimes, as in the wall pieces, that identification is based upon the slim evidence of diminutive proportions. The exhibition as a whole was suffused by means of tenderness.

COPYRIGHT 1994 Brant Publications, Inc.

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