The Sculpture of Nancy Graves

On exhibit at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe  Gallery

525 W 22nd Street New York, NY 10011

She was a painter, printmaker, and avant-garde filmmaker, but the American artist Nancy Graves (1939-1995) is perhaps best known for her groundbreaking sculpture that integrated Abstract Expressionist style with inspirations from science, archaeology, and the natural world. Graves’s work is not seen enough in New York, and a selection of small polychrome bronzes from the 1980s formed a tight, gem of an exhibition at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe which ran from September 17th through October 24th. The exhibition was the first since the gallery’s relocation to Chelsea this summer.

 Graves received her MFA from Yale University’s School of Art and Architecture in 1964 where she was a member of a particularly talented class that included Richard Serra (to whom she was married from 1965 to 1970), Chuck Close, Brice Marden, Janet Fish, and Rackstraw Downes. Graves’s breakthrough in the mid-sixties was formed by her series of sculpted camels—life-sized constructions of burlap, skin, and wax on armatures of wood and steel. The camels were inspired, in part, by the wax models of eighteenth-century anatomist Clemente Susini that Graves had studied while living in Florence, Italy. The camels also may have embodied memories of the natural history displays at the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where her father had worked and which Graves had visited as a child. In 1969, Graves’s camels were showcased in an exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art—the first solo exhibition for a female artist at the Whitney.

left: Camels, VI, VII, VIII, mixed media, 1968-9

Why camels? Because ‘[c]amels shouldn’t exist,’ said artist Nancy Graves (Class of ’61) when she [returned to the Vassar] campus as the President’s Distinguished Visitor in 1986. ‘They have flesh on their hoofs, four stomachs and a dislocated jaw. Yet, with all of the illogical form, the camel still functions. And though they may be amusing, they are still wonderful to watch.’ Graves created her first camel in Florence in 1966. Two years later, she would wow the art world in New York City with her solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art: three Bactrian camels with their extravagant curves, a whimsical, arresting study in balance.”    – Vassar Quarterly, Winter, 1986

Graves eventually moved into bronze casting, learning the difficult lost-wax process that allowed her to create elements from found organic and man-made forms. She then assembled these elements and welded them together. The twelve sculptures on display at Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe date from this period of Graves’s career. The sculptures are composed of a range of items—amid the scrap metal and grills one can spy seedpods, spirals, potato chips, and leaves. The works have a robust exuberance that raises them above the level of simple whimsy: there is a sense of joy in a crawfish executing a perfect backflip at the pinnacle of Swen (Glass Series) [1983]. Graves colored the sculptures using patination, a chemical process that fuses pigments to bronze, and the intensity and range of hues—hot orange, lapis lazuli, and sea foam green (surely no other modern artist has employed so much sea foam green without irony)—resembles the variegated fauna of a tropical reef. A more organic work such as Stur (Glass Series) [1983] even evokes some delicate, lacy sea creature. The exhibition proved that Graves’s wit, profuse imagination, and shrewd bird-like attention for detail were as present in her small-scale pieces as they were in her larger creations.

by Erin Rother, Contributing Writer

 Read more about Nancy Graves and The Nancy Graves Foundation: www.nancygravesfoundation.org

Visit the New York Gallery, Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe: www.ameringer-yohe.com

left: Nancy Graves Sculpture of the 1980’s  is available at http://www.amazon.com

 

 

Photography by Thomas Quigley ? 2009 Ameringer | McEnery | Yohe, New York, NY