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Isaac Witkin at Locks
Art in America, Nov, 2006 by Miriam Seidel
Isaac Witkin's show in Locks Gallery's roof garden became an accidental memorial exhibition when the artist died, at age 69, only a few weeks after helping to select the work and oversee its installation. The four large welded-steel pieces, from his middle period, represent only a narrow sampling of his output. A true memorial exhibition, encompassing a full range of this important sculptor's work, will have to wait.
Beginning as a student of Anthony Caro and assistant to Henry Moore, the South African-born Witkin first gained attention in London in the early 1960s with his arresting objects of fiberglass and wood finished in Pop-bright colors. After moving to the United States in 1965, he shifted to larger-scale, open steel constructions. In the 1970s he again reinvented his work using directly poured bronze, yielding a distinctive, process-based visual language that he continued to explore in the ensuing decades.
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In spite of these shifts in medium and technique, constancies in Witkin's work are readily discerned; the pieces at Locks pointed backward and forward, offering insights into both his previous and subsequent work. The earliest, Vermont II (Summer), 1965, announced the artist's new beginnings in America (at Bennington, where he came to teach) with a burst of dazzling optimism in form and color. Two rippling yellow forms fan out from an inner vertical spine, revealing a juicy magenta interior. The sculpture's unified form--closer in shape, color and feel to the London work--stands in contrast to the composition of the other works, more rambling assemblages of curving and angular geometric elements. Angola II (1968) is dark and authoritative, with three joined half-cylinders lifting off from a zigzagging base. The smallest cylinder, located at the highest point, scoops upward and outward, as if to offer a note of hope in a difficult time.
The low-lying Kosazaan (1972), which perhaps references Witkin's memories of his homeland, shows him continuing to experiment with color, in this case a delicate seagreen that aerates the massive, upwardly thrusting forms. Chesterwood (1980), finished in a jaunty pink-orange, was Witkin's last large steel work. Its stepped progressions of half-discs and ziggurat shapes construct a freeform open frame, a compositional device that the artist continued to use as he worked with the more unpredictable shapes of poured bronze.
In spite of their hard edges and industrial material, these pieces are more lyrical than Caro's work of the same period, and foreshadow the plangently organic bronze leaves, petals and stems that Witkin later used as building blocks. The gestural vigor of the four large sculptures, along with an animating tension between assemblage and unified object, are as evident here as at any point in his career.
COPYRIGHT 2006 Brant Publications, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
