Los Angeles Times

A new dimension

Spacious exhibition ‘ Revolution in the Making’ explores the unheralded history of women sculptors.

- CHRISTOPHE­R KNIGHT ART CRITIC

Sometimes the seemingly simple act of occupying space can be a radical, profoundly political act.

So it was for the thousands who crowded into a corporate plaza in lower Manhattan five years ago to metaphoric­ally Occupy Wall Street, galvanizin­g national focus on a theme of economic inequality that is now central to the rambunc- tious presidenti­al primaries.

Or, back in 1963, for the quarter- million who thronged the Lincoln Memorial and Reflecting Pool for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, creating a landmark moment in the civil rights movement.

Over the past many decades, occupying space has also had a quieter if no less radical and politicall­y potent dimension. Space invasion is the savvy artistic subject of the f ine inaugural exhibition at the new Hauser Wirth & Schimmel Gallery, opening Sunday in downtown Los Angeles.

This is the sixth outpost for the Zurich- based Hauser & Wirth, which also has powerhouse galleries in London and New York. The 116,000square- foot renovated industrial building dwarfs convention­al commercial galleries. It in- cludes a whopping 23,700 square feet of gallery space, plus a 6,000- square- foot open- air sculpture court.

“Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women 1947- 2016” is the brainchild of gallery partner Paul Schimmel, former chief curator at the Museum of Contempora­ry Art, where he guided the program for 22 years, and his colleague Jenni Sorkin, who teaches at UC Santa Barbara. Their show features three- dimensiona­l work from the last 70 years by 34 artists.

The largest group is American, including the five sculptors from the show’s earliest years who are positioned as groundbrea­kers from before the 1960s. But artists subsequent­ly working in Europe, Latin America and Japan are also on view.

Abstract painters

led the emergence of American art into internatio­nal prominence in the decade following World War II. Notable sculptors were few and far between.

But hold on, this sprawling exhibition says. Not so fast.

Women in Los Angeles, San Francisco and New York were up to something big. If their sculptural achievemen­t has not been fully recognized, the prominence of painting and of male artists in the 1950s are primary reasons why.

So is the tendency today to view art’s feminist revolution in the 1960s and 1970s as having chiefly come about in Conceptual, media- based and performanc­e art. There’s considerab­le truth to that because those were new or historical­ly marginaliz­ed forms that women smartly colonized.

But the contributi­ons of sculptors working in a studio- based practice here get renewed focus.

In the show’s title, “Revolution in the Making,” the operative word is making.

As if to italicize the distinctio­n from what has been called “the dematerial­ization of art,” its largest representa­tion is sculpture of the ’ 60s and ’ 70s. Of nearly 100 works, almost half date from those years.

The show is divided into four roughly 20- year chronologi­cal sections — one for each of the four gallery spaces in the sprawling industrial complex. It opens with a bang.

From the earliest years, a powerful room includes 12 organicall­y shaped hanging sculptures in woven wire by Ruth Asawa; a dozen totemic quasi- f igures by Louise Bourgeois; a big wall of salvaged wooden castoffs painted black by Louise Nevelson; a cluster of seven of Claire Falkenstei­n’s tangled metal blobs, each suggesting the pupa of some unborn beast of the Atomic Age; and, not least, a fearsome selection of six canvas, saw- toothed metal and twisted wire wall reliefs by Lee Bontecou.

In purely abstract terms, all of them evoke an emerging new life. And they generally set aside the methods and materials of traditiona­l sculpture, such as carving stone and casting bronze.

The result is a sharp sense of starting over from scratch — unsurprisi­ng ( but exciting) from a postwar generation.

And speaking of twisted and woven wire: It shows up again and again throughout the exhibition, sometimes as the main motif, sometimes in a supporting role and sometimes morphed into rope, thread, fabric, hemp or polyuretha­ne. I counted 14 artists who employ it.

The material technique culminates in Jackie Winsor’s 20- foot- tall column of birch trees and branches tightly bound in hemp. Nature’s looming, thwarted tower- of- power rises in the urban central courtyard as the spindle around which the exhibition turns.

Arachne, the gifted mortal woman who challenged Athena’s incomparab­le weaving skills in Greco- Roman mythology and was turned into a spider- goddess for her impudence, takes a contempora­ry spin.

The other material frequently encountere­d is latex. In a thin sheet, it conjures skin, such as the clusters of vulva- like leaves in Hannah Wilke’s wall works. Figurative associatio­ns arise from abstract forms.

Arguably the show’s most beautiful room brings these tendencies together in fragile, gorgeous works by three artists.

Eva Hesse spread thin layers of translucen­t latex over canvas, giving a traditiona­l painting support an abstract bodily connotatio­n, quietly radiant with captured inner light.

Gego ( Gertrud Louise Goldschmid­t) twisted silvery stainless- steel wire into delicate, open- framework suspended sculptures that playfully cross crystallin­e forms with ethereal star maps.

Finally, Mira Schendel pierced slight sheets of f ibrous rice paper with thread, hanging them on a line between two walls like frail bits of laundry gently rippling on the slightest currents of air. Schendel’s sculpture is like an unwrit- ten book deconstruc­ted, its blank pages courting serendipit­y.

Cross- generation­al con- nections are also drawn. In the last room, Lara Schnitger’s recent works, which dress up tall poles in abstract warrior- princess costumes of leather and lace, nod back to the tall, skinny, totemic personages by Bourgeois in the first room.

The references are not parochiall­y limited, either.

Classic Mike Kelley stuffed- animal sculptures from the 1980s are in the knowing ancestry of Shinique Smith’s swollen, vagabond- like bundles of colorful fabric suspended overhead; Phyllida Barlow’s explosive forest of hanging cloth- clusters, at once playful and vaguely ominous ( think hangman’s noose) as it gobbles space; and the tangled, found- textile wall reliefs of Sonia Gomes, nestled in a corner.

The show strikes only one false note, and it is not from the hands of the gallery.

nstead, a slew of art museums have tossed profession­al standards overboard to lend a boatload of sculptures from their permanent collection­s to what is, for all its intellectu­al provocatio­ns, an inescapabl­y commercial endeavor.

Thirteen American museums, including major institutio­ns in L. A., Chicago, Houston, Boston and New York, have lent fully one- quarter of the show. That must be some kind of record. Given Schimmel’s wellearned respect as a curator, collegiali­ty is no doubt involved in so many museums agreeing to this perhaps unpreceden­ted situation.

Still, nonprofit museums, whose mission is education, are different from galleries, whose mission is commerce — even when a show is as thoughtful and provocativ­e as this one.

Museum works are here interspers­ed with gallery inventory, as well as with loans from private collectors and other galleries — all actually or potentiall­y for sale.

On one hand, the inap- propriate loans indicate the degree to which museums today must court the goodwill of high- powered internatio­nal art dealership­s.

On the other, they leave you with a nagging question: Why, if a revisionis­t exhibition of historical­ly important sculpture by women was such a good idea, did none of these 13 museums manage it?

The gallery is doing its job, but the museums aren’t. Few care much about such distinctio­ns anymore, so pervasive is the global art market. More should.

 ?? Kirk McKoy
Los Angeles Times ?? HANGING SCULPTURES in woven wire by Ruth Asawa are among groundbrea­king works in “Revolution in the Making.”
Kirk McKoy Los Angeles Times HANGING SCULPTURES in woven wire by Ruth Asawa are among groundbrea­king works in “Revolution in the Making.”
 ?? Photog r aphs by Kirk McKoy
Los Angeles Times ?? THE VAST dimensions of the new Hauser Wirth & Schimmel facility, top, make it the perfect venue for a large show like its inaugural “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947- 2016,” which includes hanging works, left, and “Wheel With...
Photog r aphs by Kirk McKoy Los Angeles Times THE VAST dimensions of the new Hauser Wirth & Schimmel facility, top, make it the perfect venue for a large show like its inaugural “Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women, 1947- 2016,” which includes hanging works, left, and “Wheel With...
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111ALL- CAPS LEDE- I N: This is caption type.

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