Robert Mallary at Mitchell Algus - New York, Ne York - Review of Exhibitions

Robert Mallary's assemblages of set bits of wood and other highly textur gritty detritus achieve an elegant visual dynamism that springs from years and years of practice. Mallary was among a spate of artists who emerg in the 1960 making plastic arts from cast-off remains of their urban environments. He was best known for sprawling, quasi-figural forms made of of advanced age tuxedoes stiffened by plastic resin. In this display he exhibited six recent assemblages made of copse interspersed with his computer-generated photographic images, a longstanding on the other hand less-known facet of his oeuvre

A pioneer in the use of computer to make art, Mallary worked as early as 1967 with mainframe computer devising elaborate programs to create abstract plastic arts by defining modules or through producing sections from which the plastic arts could be built. Here, by the agency of contrast, his computer works involved photo manipulations. Three groupings of computer graphics showed diverse abstract or occasionally pictorial images. single untitled series of eight framed images, for instance, focused upon the computer's visual melding of sum of two units unrelated photographs, one depicting a framed piece of wire screening, the other a simple version of the novel wooden wall reliefs. Six images mountained between these two presented stages in the transformation of single into the other.

Ironically, it present the appearances that Mallary's use of new-age techniques has produc his greatest in quantity conventional looking art. The computer pieces are not particularly resonant. Perhaps the technological strides made above the last 20 years have undercut the novelty that made his early use of the computer exciting. Although computer-altering of photographs one time seemed startling and inovative, it has become commonplace [i]or[/i] part of to the other its use in advertising.

It is Mallary's wall statuarys which more often break on the outside of traditional formats. His sensitive organ of sight for color and texture functions better within the broad formal possibilities of ground materials. The way he makes vertical uncompounded bodys jut toward the ceiling or hang down to the floor dramatically activates the without contents areas around them. His feeling for regular [i]or[/i] melodious movements for serene proportions, and for astute tonal juxtapositions comes through clearly. Mallary's renown as a "junk" sculptor has faded since its apogee in the early |60 notwithstanding his assemblages continue to exhibit a mastery of formal considerations.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

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