Art+Auction - March 2016_

ART+AUCTION MARCH 2016 (^) | BLOUINARTINFO.COM
Genzken’s cast-concrete sculptural
works, like Vogelnest (Bird’s Nest),
1989, pick up the trajectory of those
such as Bourgeois’s wedges in terms of
abstraction and the use of continuing
forms, repetitions, and seriality. They
function almost as models for unrealiz-
able architectural elements, so these
pieces of cast concrete represent struc-
tures or private places of architectural
imagination. They deliberately reengage
the relationship between the object and
the base, as the bases themselves are
part of the sculptures; they are structural
armatures on which the concrete rests.
In some ways Genzken was responding to
Minimalism by taking these primary
forms and structures and turning them
into something more eccentric, with
a greater sense of their own making.
And unlike that of the Minimalists,
Genzken’s works don’t have that factory-
produced fit and finished aesthetic. —PS
Found material is so popular now, and
Stockholder was one of the first artists
to start working with it in a profound way.
She is a pivotal artist—not only because
she teaches and has been very influ-
ential on several generations of younger
artists, but because, beginning in the late
1980s, she started making really large-
scale, installation-based work with found
material and reworking the material to
highlight architectural spaces. Kissing
the Wall #5 with Yellow, 1990, part of a
larger series from which we’re showing
76
JESSICA
STOCKHOLDER
ISA GENZKEN
a few works, is made of spools of thread
piled high on a found chair. There’s a
fluorescent light shining behind it that
is splattered in yellow paint so it all
becomes one piece of a structure even
though it’s many different parts. She’s
really pushed the boundaries between
painting and sculpture, not unlike Robert
Rauschenberg, who drove a wedge
between painting and sculpture with his
combines. Stockholder is doing the
same thing and breaking down a gender
barrier as well. —JS