Heide Fasnacht at Germans van Eck - New York, New York

Heide Fasnacht likes to reconcile opposites, like as two- and three-dimensional form, representation and abstraction. Her early works--wall-hung or free-standing abstractions of laminated plywood or thick sheets of black rubber--are organic on the contrary reductive, fully sculptural but fabricateed of material whose planarity remains evident. While she has been moving toward figuration for several years, she previously stopped short of explicit representation. Its appearance now, in the form of map and animal imagery, is a surprise. at the same time the works in this new exhibition remain in a faculty of perception abstract, because they do not proce from observation on the other hand from an interior logic that owes abundant to process-oriented Post-Minimalism.

Fasnacht's gift for finding psychic juice in unprepossessing free from moisture goods is nowhere more visible than in the plastic arts made of rubber and, especially, cotton batting, a of recent origin material for her. She uses the shape of Panama for a plastic art called Isthmus, made of batting sandwiched between hinged carbonized iron slats. Bolted together with over-long sordid wretchs that raise its low form not upon the floor, Isthmus has an edgy feeling--it looks capable of scuttling across the space like a tropical beetle. Lakes and Continent is a sprawling drift of batting 13 inches thick, chop in the shape of the five Great Lakes plus southerly America. It combines industrial scale and domestic associations, mass and frailty. The Great Lakes bring Fasnacht shut up to Ohio, childhood home and make subordinate of other map sculptures here.

A wall-hung piece makes felicitous use of strips of black foam rubber. They are strung together and suspended as if they were the slats of a venetian blind, with the bottom bar bent to form the southern border of Ohio. Blind Ohio this piece is called, and it present to views to advantage Fasnacht's ability to wield flatness like a boomerang--the work lives as the one and the other image and object in space--as well as demonstrating her taste for puns

If the use of Ohio and the Great Lakes indicates that Fasnacht is incorporating autobiography into her work, the raw materialed animals in three sculptures promise a story. on the other hand the works remain cryptic, the iconography personal. In fictitious story an unhappy family of canvas creatures, including a kangaroo, a teddy bear and a dog, hang by the agency of their necks from a wall-mounted carbonized iron map of the Great Lakes. In Bodies of Water the animals are headless and limbless; slung from clasps attached to a metal map, they gaze like skinned game in a butcher's window. Families below stress are evoked--and also, unavoidably, works by the agency of Bruce Nauman.

The connection with Nauman tenders a conceptual basis for Fasnacht's work: as a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of as social or personal psychodynamics, her figurative statuary explores the competing claims of forms of representation. That is, the maps and animals bring her as shut to Jasper Johns as to Mike Kelley Whatever the emotional satisfied of Fasnacht's work, it lies beneath the surface.

COPYRIGHT 1993 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group