arlene shechet

new work

september 6 – october 6, 2007

reception: thursday september 6, 6-8 pm

The Elizabeth Harris Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Arlene Shechet.  This is her third solo exhibition with the gallery.

Arlene Shechet's recent sculptures--of perverse, hybrid, hollow, twisting, glazed ceramic--puff, breathe, float and touch down, coalescing around the present moment like air filled skins or passing clouds.  In an extraordinary body of new work, Shechet stays faithful to the influences that have moved her in the past—the fertile overlap of East and West, ancient and modern, sacred and secular—while moving away from the iconographic and toward the abstract.  Embracing a new material—clay—the artist leaves us with physical works that literally bear the marks of their creation.  Working the clay with her body, the artist reveals the special quality of the material to mirror or move with her touch.  The finished works, like her earlier Buddhas, are formed by touch and hold its memory—they are time pieces or recording devices, dark sculptures that wake us up, shock and embarrass us, make us self-conscious and uncomfortable, and make us laugh and catch our breath.  

Fusing the decorative and the fine arts, Shechet's hollow sculptures, with their proliferating spouts and tubes, make deliberate reference to vessels.  More radical than simple abstract sculpture, the resulting hybrid forms, with their vocabulary of holes and protrusions, are overtly sexual, reminding the viewer of the androgyny of classical Indian sculpture.  Made of dense material, yet simultaneously buoyant and humorous, Shechet's sculptures resist a single reading.  Deliberately undermining one, Shechet pairs the natural with the unnatural: covering the organic clay bodies with a metallic glaze, creating a refracting and reflective surface that gives the sculptures complexity and dissonance, breaking up and fractionating reality as quickly and effortlessly as she has created a new one.  The resulting lightness and humor relate back to the breath.  Always changing, never entirely contained, flowing between inside and out, the breath, like good sculpture, reveals itself anew, moment by ever elusive moment. 

As Peter Nagy writes in his accompanying essay, Perfumed Manifestations , “Successful art can usually be described as indescribable.  Shechet's sculptures lay witness to our present consciousness, entangled in intricacies both individual and collective.”

Arlene Shechet lives and works in New York City.  She has been the recent recipient of a John S. Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship Award as well as 3 separate New York Foundation on the Arts awards.  She is currently at work on a public project in Northern Portugal, a permanent installation for the new American Embassy in Beijing and a November installation at the Katonah Museum of Art.  Her work is in numerous public and private collections both nationally and internationally.

For further information please contact Miles Manning at 212 463-9666.