Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce "Garth Evans: Sculpture from the Late 1980s,” an exhibition of free-standing and wall-mounted sculpture representing a body of work completed between 1986 and 1989. The fourteen pieces on view exemplify Evans’ unique process of combining cardboard, resin and fiberglass to create angular but unusual geometric forms. This is the artist’s second solo show of sculpture at Lori Bookstein, following upon the life-size floor works exhibited in 2006.
Although Evans’ entire career has been dedicated to working in the abstract, his sculpture is frequently evocative of the physical world. The complexity and variety of the wall pieces – many are dense and volumetric, others contain mysterious voids within collapsed structures – are rife with allusions to animals and things. A highly individuated treatment of color, produced both from bright papers embedded in the resin and paint applied to the surface, compounds the sense of each sculpture’s distinct personality.
Writing in a 1988 catalogue essay for the Yale Center for British Art, Dore Ashton encapsulates the viewer’s navigation between the abstract materiality of these pieces and their metaphorical associations. Of her initial encounter with “Mrs. Turpin’s Pig,” a floor work, she writes:
I first saw it as a melting pink glow of light and then as an abstract configuration of basically rectangular forms. Then, almost immediately, I saw it, with its pearly pink surface and its faint pentimento of drawing, just beneath the skin, so to speak, as an almost organic – uncomfortably organic – object. In its perverse contraposto (I was, after all, looking down on it) this reclining object could find no name, and yet was insistently suggestive. As I moved about surveying the volumes, they moved also and appeared almost like a reclining figure. Surpassingly strange. Not geometric. Not organic. Not non-organic.
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, when he moved to the United States. 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). He has also twice been granted residencies at Yaddo (1982 and 1991). Evans currently works and resides in Woodstock, Connecticut.
"Garth Evans: Sculpture from the Late 1980s” will be on view through April 25th, 2009. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30am to 6:00pm. For additional information and/or visual materials, please contact the gallery at (212) 750-0949 or info@loribooksteinfineart.com.