NYAB Event - Louise Kruger “1924-2013”

Louise Kruger “1924-2013”

Lori Bookstein Fine Art

This event has ended.

Lori Bookstein Fine Art presents an exhibition of sculpture by Louise Kruger. This is the artist’s fourth solo-show with the gallery.

This exhibition will serve as a memorial to the late artist, who passed away in October of 2013. Although Kruger practiced her work across a variety of media including wood, bronze, silver, fabric and prints, Louise Kruger: 1924-2013 will focus on the artist’s celebrated carved wood sculptures dating from the mid-fifties to the late eighties.

This show presents a cast of distinctive figures and animals including a farmer, a woman seated at a window, and an oversized spider. Frequently confounding and simple in form, Kruger’s sculptures are often rough-hewn and their assembly of wing nuts, screws and blots are all highly visible. Like an editor of the human body, she elides certain features while insistently remarking upon others. Although they certainly draw influence from American Folk Art, African Tribal Art and even sculptor Elie Nadelman, they maintain the artist’s own formal quirks. Indeed, a disarmingly folksy craftsmanship is as easily the backdrop for genuine playfulness and whimsical exploration as it is for incisive political and feminist concerns. At times, her message is stark and precise, while at other times, the meaning is more ambiguous and urges the viewer to complete subtle innuendos that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Louise Kruger (1924 - 2013) attended Scripps College, Claremont, CA and The Art Students League of New York. In addition to her formal education, she studied woodworking and joinery with a ship builder in New Jersey and traditional metal-working techniques at foundries in Pistoia, Italy and Kumasi, Ghana. The artist has been exhibited widely including exhibitions at Martha Jackson Gallery, Schoelkopf Gallery, Landmark Gallery, and Condeso/Lawler Gallery. Most notably, in 1953, she was included in the New Talent show at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Kruger’s work is included in several public collections including the Brooklyn Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Museum of Modern Art and the New York Public Library.