Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to present a body of wall-mounted sculptures by Garth Evans made during the early 1980s. Evans, a British-born sculptor who gained a reputation in England for abstract, often floor-bound minimalist work, moved to the United States in 1979 and has been rethinking the language of abstraction since. The plywood works on view explore abstract geometric form in small, concentrated nuggets affixed flush to the wall. Despite their strict linearity, the works suggest movement and evoke underlying forms, although all associations are left open-ended for the viewer.
The carefully executed surfaces, particular to each sculpture, heighten both the object-ness of each work and its individual personality. Painted, rubbed and sanded patinas reveal the sensuousness of the artist’s hand. (In addition to his work in sculpture, a significant portion of Evans’s career has been dedicated to work on paper. His watercolors, previously exhibited at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, have a sculptural dimension which relates directly to the forms and colors of these plywood works.) In the current issue of Sculpture, the critic Janet Koplos highlights the paradoxical nature of the artist’s methods – the interplay between the importance of form and the attention to surface, the organic versus inorganic elements present in his work – explaining that “these shifts, these subtleties, make Evans’s work a treasury: every viewer can find a set of allusions or associations or issues, and the work (as the best art always is) is open enough to be available to endless re-understanding. So what identifies Evans’s oeuvre is a mindset, or a way of working, in the absence of any obvious visual feature.”
Garth Evans was born in Cheshire, England in 1934. He studied at the Manchester College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and had his first one-person show in 1962 at London’s Rowan Gallery, where he exhibited for two decades. Evans was a lecturer at St. Martin's School of Art from 1965 to 1979; additional academic appointments include the Camberwell School of Art in London, the Yale School of Art and the New York Studio School, where he has been teaching since 1988 and is the Head of Sculpture. Evans has been the recipient of numerous awards, among these the Gulbenkian Purchase Award (1964), the Arts Council of Great Britain Major Award (1975), the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1986), the Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation, “Space Program” Participant (1992-93) and the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Award (1996). In 2010, Evans was inducted as a member of the National Academy. He has also twice been granted residencies at Yaddo (1982 and 1991). Evans lives and works in Woodstock, Connecticut. This is the artist’s fourth show with Lori Bookstein Fine Art.
Garth Evans: 1980s Plywood Wall Sculptures is on view in Gallery II November 3 to December 11, 2010. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 am to 6:00 pm, and by appointment. For additional information or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or info@loribooksteinfineart.com.