NYAB Event - Anne Arnold "Sculpture from Four Decades"

Anne Arnold "Sculpture from Four Decades"

Alexandre Gallery

This event has ended.

Presenting the first one-person exhibition of Anne Arnold’s sculpture in twenty-four years. Surveying work from the 1950s through the 1980s, the exhibition includes 29 classic examples of her animals in wood, ceramic, metal and painted or resin-coated canvas stretched over wooden armatures. These works range from a roughly carved creosote coated pine sphinx-like cat to the front end of a life-sized horse in an unbalanced moment of rising up on its legs. In a period when Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, Pop Art and many other movements came and went, Arnold persisted down her own path, eventually defining a singular position in American sculpture. While Arnold’s own early role in the development and wide acceptance of Pop is made clear, it can also be argued that Arnold understood better than her peers the traditions of the first “popular” American art forms found in vernacular, vintage folk objects such as weathervanes, decoys and hand-painted country advertising. Arnold’s work is quirky and personal, and humor is often a characteristic. Her animals’ body language is spot-on, whether it be the stretching lean of a cat, the raked ears of a crouching rabbit, or the unexpected lightness and grace of a large farm animal. We know an animal differently after seeing one of Arnold’s sculptures and, perhaps, care about them more for their individual traits evoked so precisely as essential form, gesture and presence.

[Image: Anne Arnold "Nimble (Sheep)" (1973) polyester resin coated dynel over wooden armature 18.5 in. high]