KAREN WILKIN
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tions; the piece managed to evoke the lingerie of the 1950s and the ante–
bellum South, fragile blossoms, and a good many more fleshly images, all
without compromising its presence as a precariously balanced, physically
absorbing object.
A similar ambiguity, although very different in mood, prevailed in
William Tucker's show of recent work at David McKee Gallery. Tucker
seems to aspire to reveal the essence of figurative sculpture - an uneasy
coexistence of the primordial lump and the body - coaxing inert accu–
mulations of matter into expressive masses with a vigorous hand.
Sometimes, he tests how much the lump can be allowed to dominate
before the concept of willed sculptural form disappears, while at others,
he appears to colonize the outer limits of allusive reference, making a sin–
gle articulate form simultaneously call up an entire torso and a whole
lexicon of limbs and joints. Among Tucker's recent works, many of the
smaller, "life-size" sculptures achieved an extraordinary balance between
these extremes; primal volumes eloquendy resolved themselves into tense,
fleeting glimpses of body fragments, like echoes of Rodin's truncated
Fig–
ure volante
or the startling mid-section of his
Iris,
with her wide-flung legs.
(Tucker's perceptive writings on Rodin reveal a good deal about his own
endeavors.) The pale, agitated surfaces of the recent plasters, as opposed to
the recent bronzes (or bronze patinated plasters) heightened the sense of
the hand that conjured up their eloquent forms .
I wish that I had liked Nancy Graves's spring show at Knoedler, espe–
cially since it was the first in New York since the tragic death of this
gifted artist, but I found the sculptures - amalgams, according to a gallery
informatation sheet, of "natural" and "cultural" objects - extremely
problematic. Graves had a gallimaufry of raw material cast in bronze and
elaborately patinated - everything from baseball bats to fragmented classi–
cal heads to heliconia flowers to indescribable expressions of pure kitsch -
and used these unlikely elements to construct modestly scaled sculptures.
But where the similarly transubstantiated tropical leaves and fronds of
Graves's earlier sculptures read as witty, wholly unreal parodic plants, the
more recent works never became convincing wholes. Structural inven–
tion never subsumed the identity of the laboriously accumulated parts, so
that while you felt that you ought to admire Graves's cleverness
in
assem–
bling all the bits - and in having had it all cast in the first place - you
were not engaged by a new expressive object that slowly disclosed the
origins of its components.
A quartet of painters - a young British woman who lives in the north of
England, a mature Englishman who divides his time between Spain and
Brooklyn, and two Americans - offered exhibitions worth noting this
spring. Roxy Walsh's "Wish You Were Beautiful," at Annika Sundvik
