PRESENTATION: Arlene Shechet-Girl Group

Arlene Shechet is a sculptor known for her effortless combination of disparate elements, precarious and provisional arrangements, and boundary-collapsing visual paradoxes. With gravity-defying work that seems to tilt, contort, bend, and melt, Shechet’s sculptures appear to be set in motion while unearthing the expressive potential of material and forms and forcing us to sit with—and move around—its contradictions.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Storm King Art Center Archive

Highly technical yet entirely intuitive, Arlene Shechet’s  work embraces improvisation and seeks to examine the humor and pathos of the lived human experience. The exhibition “Girl Group” brings together Arlene Shechet’s recent work in wood, steel, ceramic, paper, and bronze with six new monumental sculptures created for Storm King Art Center. Through her signature emphasis on process and improvisation, Shechet harnesses the expressive power of geometry, line, color, and form in works displayed across Storm King’s hills, fields, and galleries. The artist maintains a spirit of constant discovery as she mines the possibilities of multiple sculptural materials, experimenting with their capacity to hold color and light while creating form and volume. The exhibition centers on the translation of lyrical ceramic works from Shechet’s Together series, on view indoors, into robust, large-scale painted metal works outdoors. Shechet began her ceramic series during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic in order to convey a “strong sense of a life force that seemed to be gone during that time.” Each work is titled with a time of day or a moment in a season: a means by which to reflect upon existence amid the uncertainty of that period.   Shechet calls the “Together” works the “generative seeds” of her outdoor sculptures. The new works expand the artist’s intuitive and handmade approach into towering constructions of welded metal. Over the course of three years, Shechet fluidly alternated between digital and analog methods of creation, extrapolating from elements of the Together works to invent new forms through an open-ended process of call-and-response.  Outdoors, the hollow clay of Shechet’s ceramics transforms into open volumes of sheet metal, while the vibrant and textured glazes of her ceramics inspire an array of painted colors rarely seen in monumental sculpture. Shechet’s works incorporate nature as material, harnessing it through negative space and the use of matte and glossy surfaces to reflect and absorb light. Their shifting colors form a spectrum across Storm King, allowing visitors to identify a shared vocabulary over great distances. The exhibition’s six outdoor works resonate individually but also come together as a chorus. Like most of Shechet’s outdoor sculptures, “Dawn” is painted in two colors: in this case, matte peach and glossy lilac, with contrasting swaths of aluminum left unpainted. Despite this minimal palette, the work seems to contain a diverse spectrum of hues which shift moment-to-moment as light and shadow move across the surface of the work. Shechet describes this phenomenon, saying “within each work there is a palette that is two shifting colors, not contrasting, but shifting colors, as if a natural event had occurred that made the colors shift from one to the other, a little dash of sunlight, a cloudy day, something that happened.” Each of Shechet’s outdoor works contain both matte and glossy surfaces, which reflect and absorb the landscape so that no two views are the same. They change with the light and the weather, but they also change as the viewer moves around the work. For the artist, “sculpture is always about movement and the body,” and Shechet’s works encourage visitors to approach them from different angles to observe how their palette transforms in an ever-changing environment. Dawn’s palette resonates with another constructed metal sculpture nearby, Study in Arcs by David Smith, a rare example of pale pink nestled in the landscape, which Shechet was delighted to discover while visiting Storm King.

“Maiden May” sits on a concrete plinth near the Museum Building, gesturing toward the rolling hills to the east. Its matte and glossy surfaces reflect and absorb the landscape, the vivid green of the painted aluminum merging with the greens of the trees and grasses. The work is sited in proximity to a group of sculptures by David Smith–some of the earliest works in Storm King’s permanent collection. Smith worked in the tradition of modern constructed sculpture, using welding and other means to attach disparate pieces of metal together, creating forms that are suggestive rather than fixed, open rather than solid. Shechet has emphasized that the monumental works she created as part of Girl Group are meant to be in conversation not only with the natural environment, but with the many existing works populating the fields at Storm King. The vibrant yellow and green surfaces of “As April” draw visitors down the grassy hillside toward the twenty-foot-tall construction. As Shechet was developing her new large-scale outdoor sculptures for Storm King, she remarked on the limited color palette typically associated with this mode of art-making: “Color being present in these large works that I’m making is very important to me because I feel that it’s a completely different energy in the landscape. Introducing color and vibrancy and playfulness feels like an in-your-face female thing to do. It’s definitely possible to make strong, towering works, and yet present them as playful and generative in a way that people can relate to. While the palette of “As April” distinguishes it from other works on view from Storm King’s collection, it resonates deeply with the natural landscape: a burst of color like new buds in springtime or dandelions sprinkling a summer lawn. Of all the outdoor works “Midnight” has the largest footprint: more than twenty-five feet of constructed aluminum painted in warm sunset tones. Nestled in the tall grasses of the farm fields, “Midnight’s: intersecting planes are punctuated with openings—apertures through which the landscape is incorporated into, and becomes part of, the work itself. Shechet says, “I was thinking about the idea of supports, and I was thinking about how the sculptures are supported by the landscape and vice versa. That is a very special relationship that only sculpture can embrace.” The artwork grew from an earlier ceramic sculpture, which is on view inside the Museum Building. The red-glazed surface of the ceramic opens to reveal pockets of deep blue, and in its form one can gain insight into the way in which Shechet translated her ceramics into the towering metal works on display outdoors. Standing beside the softly-curving form of “Bea Blue”, it is possible to see all six outdoor sculptures in the exhibition at once. “Dawn” and “Maiden May” stand sentinel by the Museum Building, Rapunzel looks out over the hillside, and As April and Midnight carry the eye down the allée towards the South Fields. The siting of these new works, as chosen by Shechet, ensures that the viewer is always experiencing more than one work at a time. Shechet says, “The idea of Girl Group is that each sculpture functions as a solo and as a member of an ensemble. I was thinking about their relationship with each other from the beginning, but also working the sightlines throughout the landscape.” At the edge of Museum Hill, the monumental “Rapunzel” swoops down from over twenty feet in the air, tracing a form similar to that of the ceramic “Together: Rapunzel”, the generative “seed” on view in the Museum Building. At the intimate scale of the ceramic, the curve of the wok hair is a small gesture, while in the landscape the corresponding arc becomes large enough to sit on—something Shechet purposefully designed as an invitation to the viewer. Looking up from this vantage point, the large, thin sheets of metal twist against the sky. These constructed forms are fluid, organic in nature, and serve as a way for Shechet to invite the environment into her work.

Photo: Arlene Shechet, Dawn, 2024, Aluminum, paint, 11 ft. x 8 ft. 7/16 in. x 6 ft. 5/16 in. (335.3 x 244.9 x 183.6 cm), Courtesy of the Artist and Pace Gallery, Photo by David Schulze

Info: Curators: Eric Booker and Adela Goldsmith, Storm King Art Center, 1 Museum Road, New Windsor, NY, USA, Duration: 4/5-10/11/2024, Days & Hours: Mon, Wed-Fri & Sun 10:00-17:30m Sat 20:00-19:30, https://stormking.org/