KAREN WILKIN
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Catlett is a carver who makes her material, whether wood or stone,
wholly subservient to the simplified, geometric forms with which she
constructs the body. In her best work, image and material seem inextri–
cable. Her lifelong commitment to modernist figuration is plain - she
studied with Zadkine in the early 1940s - as well as her dialogue with
Mexican modernism and pre-Columbian art - she was a student of
Zuniga's and has made her home in Mexico , with her husband, the
painter Francisco Mora, since the late 1940s. There's a period flavor to
much of Catlett's work, a kind of optimistic social realism that is com–
pletely understandable, given her history and politics, but the best sculp–
tures were fresh and personal.
Woman Fixing Her Hair,
1993, for example, was first-rate, with its
mask-like face, compelling inlaid eyes, and telling wrench out of frontal–
ity. The smoothly carved geometric volumes of the seated figure were
unequivocally modernist, but at the same time called up such diverse as–
sociations as Romanesque madonnas from the Auvergne and Bamana ma–
ternity
figures.
Woman Fixing Her Hair
is a tough, arresting sculpture, pe–
riod. Political correctness notwithstanding, you don't need to know that
its author is a tough, arresting Mrican-American woman in her seventies,
admirable as that is, to see the work's excellence.
Was it the season of strong-minded women who make sculpture? At
Lennon-Weinberg Gallery, Mia Westerlund Roosen showed work related
to a future project at the Storm King Sculpture Center. The prospect of
working large-scale and outdoors made her think about placing forms
in
the landscape, setting elements below ground level, but allowing them to
project above the surface of the earth, and her recent sculptures explore
these ideas at intimate scale. "Leaves" of remarkably thin, supple-looking
concrete penetrate the surfaces of steel tables, evoking traditional still-life
setups, along with burial chambers, ironing boards, and in one instance,
patio fumiture of the 1950s. I liked best a sort of raised "trough" of steel,
where fragile leaves were stacked on end, as though casually dropped into
the container. The sexual overtones that have animated Westerlund
Roosen's work in the past were no less present here, but they were
subtler and more diffuse. The ambiguity of the recent pieces, with their
rather weird conflation of genitalia and domesticity, interests me more
than the explicitness of some earlier work, so I am extremely curious
about what we will see at Storm King next year.
Sculpture wasn't the only thing of interest last season; there were ex–
tremely diverse shows of paintings by Matthew Radford, Michael
Mulhern, and Dennis Ashbaugh, and rarely seen drawings by John
Walker. Radford, who showed canvases and works on paper simultane–
ously at Grace Borgenicht and The Gallery, Three Zero, in April and
