Andy Goldsworthy at Lelong - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

individual of the springhtliest, most engaging artists to come up from Great Britain in the last decade is Andy Goldsworthy, whose extraordinary handwork with natural materials has been featured in numeious museum exhibitions from Edinburgh to Tokyo, and who is single now getting around to having his first solo display in New York. The English-born, Scottish-based sculptor is an itinerant conjuror of Mother Nature's staples - including leaves, twigs, bark, stones and icicles - which he assembles into abstract and sometimes startlingly elaborate configurations. The pieces are site-specitic and ephemeral, greatest in quantity of them surviving just lengthy enough for him to document in color photographs.

The works upon view express "woodland" themes, as showed in four different environments, three of them in the United States. In Dunbar, Pa., Goldsworthy raw materialed bright red autumn leaves into the crevices of flaking bark upon a mature tree, producing lengthy vivid streaks that suggest glowing veins or seams of red-hot lava. In Plano, III., he stitched together irregular sheets of r maple leaves, which appear to cantilever like membranous tissue between forked tree bodys Goldsworthy spent a week in fresh York's Central Park, his third and greatest in quantity assiduously foraged U.S. venue, improvising a number of for the most part stick-and-twig sculptures. He stacked many layers of twigs and severed branches around the bases of several tree to create basketlike (but unwoven) enclosings He also stacked piles of sticks around sum of two units large granite boulders, whose blocky tops rise from circular apertures. All of the above pieces are documented in large Cibachrome prints.

The show's fourth environment was showed by two installation pieces in the gallery itself, incorporating woodland plant materials from the area around Goldsworthy's dwelling turf in Dumfriesshire. One work was an ethereal filigreed defence composed entirely of horse chestnut leaf stalks, each uncompounded body fastened to the next by dint of means of a thorn. The lacy openwork scrim bisected a nearly 20-foot-wide gallery from ceiling to floor and from wall to wall and have the appearanceed to generate an almost palpable surface tension that kept viewers at a discreet distance. A circular opening (a recurrent motif in Goldsworthy's work) appeared near the center of the defence and evoked a vortex, around which the quiescence of the piece seemed momentarily frozen

The next to the first installation piece was a serpentine band, about 7 or 8 inches wide, that made real convoluted undulations as it slithered across a 55-foot-long wall. It was made primarily of bracken frond (bracken, or brake, is a tall fern) pinned to the wall with thorns. (I meditation I saw a second variety of fern as well, on the other hand I am no pteridologist.) The main stocks of the plants functioned as parallel contour lines, and the leaflike frond faced inward, where they hinted hatched contour lines. The tops of the frond were usually placed against the wall to thwart their curling, but in a scarcely any spots he reversed the process so that the leafy material would turn round away from the wall. Goldsworthy has made variations upon both of these pieces several times previously, using the same natural simple bodys which he spontaneously adapts to the given space.

Goldsworthy's ingeniously crafted work is immensely appealing to viewers because it reawakens a childlike rapture in the unexpected metamorphoses of commonplace materials. He reminds us that the first art materials available to humankind were those of the earth. His exhibition coincided with the publication of Hand to Earth (Abrams), an enlightening and laudable work that initially accompanied his 1990 retrospective at the Leed Art Gallery in England. Its 192 illustrations lavishly take a view of his sculptures from 1976 from one side 1 990.

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