GALLERY CHRONICLE
by James Panero
Mel Kendrick is a sculptor of process, but his product was the big hit two years ago in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. In the center oval, the park conservancy temporarily installed five enormous new works, all of the same series called “Markers.” The forms were unmistakable Kendrick, shapes he had been working on in wood for several years.
On the occasion of Mel Kendrick’s upcoming exhibitions Jacks (March 25 – April 30, 2011) at Mary Boone Gallery and Works from 1995 to Now at David Nolan Gallery (March 17 – April 30, 2011), Brooklyn Rail Art Editor Ben La Rocco visited the artist in his Lower East Side studio to discuss his life and work.
Download PDF (402 K)Gallery Chronicle
by James Panero
Several shows this month deserve far more attention than space allows, so here are the best of them, however briefly. When I last reviewed the sculptor Mel Kendrick, another David Nolan artist, I objected to the diminutive scale of the work on view. Kendrick is a constructivist who carves an abstract shape from a wood block, then places the result on top of a base made of the leftover pieces. For an artist who likes to show his hand, sometimes the process gets the better of the product. Not so for a set of monumental sculptures now on view in Madison Square Park. Derived from many of the same forms at his last Nolan show, these outdoor giants executed in poured black-and-white concrete are playful exceptions to the cloying piles that normally pass for public sculpture. To appreciate their power, just visit the park with children around. By climbing through every hole and jumping off every shape of Kendrick's work, they understand the fun of these structures without the need for further explanation.
Five monumental sculptures — cast concrete poured in alternating layers of black and white — were installed this week throughout Madison Square Park, that swath of green space between Madison and Fifth Avenues from 23rd to 26th Street. The exhibition is the work of the New York sculptor Mel Kendrick, who is perhaps best known for his wood objects. These pieces are his first public art project in the city and his first experiment with cast concrete.
"It's a material I've wanted to work with for a long time," he said. "These pieces are all about slicing and reconstructing shapes, sort of like the idea of the old ship in a bottle."
The show's title, "Markers," has many meanings for Mr. Kendrick, including a nod to the black-and-white marble found in Gothic Italian cathedrals as well as a reference to the notion of marking one's place. - CAROL VOGEL
An unassuming show in a small gallery, Mel Kendrick's "Red Blocks" was stealthily potent. In the main room, five sculptures stood on a row on the floor, their rectangular bottoms squared with the wall. Two more faced an adjacent wall, forming a dogleg. All were made following the kind of dismantling-and-recomposing procedure Kendrick has followed in one variation or another for 20 years. In these sculptures, from 2007, a block of wood is cut into eccentric pieces; some of the pieces are removed piecemeal, reassembled more or less faithfully, and stached on top of the original. Since the sides of the blocks are painted red before the sawing begins, it si relatively simple to visualize how the pieces could all be fit back together.
Download PDF (4.4 MB)With their low center of gravity, rough-hewn chunkiness, and warm red tone, Mel Kendrick's seven "Red Blocks" are endearingly low-tech. These chiseled cubic sculptures resemble three-dimensional jigsaw puzzles or an interpretation of lawn dwarfs in the style of Picasso. Arranged in a near semicircle along the walls of the main gallery, the sculptures had an odd anthropomorphic quality, like a tribe of wooden dolls. (The back room contained a roguish leader of the pack; nearly twice as tall as its rosy brethren and painted Astroturf green, it looks like a deconstructed frog.) But despite their apparent simplicity, these mahogany building blocks are an elegant exercise in interior/exterior, positive/negative space.
Download PDF (9.3 MB)A strong show from a sculptor who pursues Postminimalism's emphasis on self-evident structure and process, while developing his own affinity for wood, hand-working, eccentric form and, well, Cubism. Each of these small red sculptures has been cut entirely from the red pedestal on which it sits, largely unaltered. The patchwork of positive and negative, mass and silhouette, red and less red makes for a lot of interesting visual guessing, but they transcend puzzling. A much larger, very green piece is especially promising.
Download PDF (96 K)Simplicity in a work of art can shock. It has been mistaken for crudeness as with Courbet's reductive brand of realism; for arrogance as with Duchamp's readymade; and for mere inadequacy as with Judd's early work. In each case, an artist's insight into how art could communicate more clearly caused viewers to balk. Is this sort of response still possible? In the age of Jake and Dinos Chapman it seems a little retardaire to be shocked by mere simplicity. But we need to differentiate. It is one thing to be appalled by what you're looking at--to be so affected by imagery of pain that you turn awayin horror. It is entirely something else for succinctness to jolt your mind into a heightened state of consciousness. These are very different kinds of shock. Although I do not wish to cast aspersions on the former, which has been a legitimate mode of expression since Matthias Grünewald and the Isenheim Altarpiece, it is on the latter that I wish to concentrate regarding the sculpture of Mel Kendrick.
Download PDF (4.1 MB)The sculptures of Mel Kendrick are remarkably various: they twist and rotate and pulse as engaging experiments in positive and negative space. From the start of his career, in the early 1970s, Kendrick has taken a strong interest in piecing together parts and planes of wood, sometimes painting his work to accentuate the relationship between the extant elements building the composition and the empty spaces their cutting out left behind. Greatly taken with the process of making things, in the hopes of demonstrating not only the attractiveness of form but also the philosophical understanding of creating shapes and parallel openings, he cuts and builds marvelously intricate works that reflect on the consequences of their own being and building.
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