Deconstructive constructivist: over more than 30 years, Don Gummer has moved from architecturally influenced installations to intricate, large-scale sculptures that give postmodern life to classic principles of abstract composition

Art in America, Jan, 2005 by Irving Sandler

In 1985, Gummer moved off the wall and again into freestanding sculpture. The turn from relief to sculpture in the round led to radical changes in his work. He retained the geometric figures associated with Constructivism, but his method of building was now improvisational, in the tradition of David Smith. Wanting both intuition and preconception, Gummer would have it both ways.

From the mid-1980s to the present, the dominant components in his sculptures have been planes composed of parallel horizontal and vertical slats or bars. The repeated linear elements form "systemic" geometric compositions, like those of Max Bill or Richard Lohse. Unlike the work of these Constructivists, however, Gummer's forms evoke motion, like the lines of three in Futurist paintings. The sense of movement is enhanced when the slatted forms resemble ladders, suggesting climbing and descending, doubling back, or twisting and turning vertically and diagonally. When varied in size and shape and situated in different parts of a work, the ladderlike elements are choreographed, as it were, giving rise to rhythms that course through the entire piece. Spiraling and spinning upward and outward, his works not only create a sense of motion but look top-heavy, off balance, as if about to tumble. At the same time, the top-heavy elements often seem to rest gracefully on a tiny base, balanced like a ballet dancer on pointe. The works, while clear, are also ambiguous; a number look ramshackle, jerry-built, jumbled--even chaotic. Visually following Gummer's ladderlike forms and other open configurations, and seeing through them to still other forms and complexes of forms, requires prolonged viewing.

In many of his constructions, Gummer incorporates a variety of wavelike open planes, as in Passage (1998), the kinds of organic shapes avoided by the Constructivists. Gummer has invented a novel means of integrating sharp-angled rectilinear with undulating curvilinear complexes by having them pass through each other. The very conception of the work is organic, indeed biomorphic, beginning with "seed" forms at the bottom of a work and growing expansively upward and out, level by level. Sometimes the pieces look like Tatlin's tower upside-down, as in The Fifth Floor (2000) and Anniversary (2002). Elsewhere, defying gravity, they evoke treelike growth or the human body. Gummer once said that his sculptures are metaphors for his own body with his lungs full of air.

While constructing freestanding sculptures, Gummer continued to create increasingly complex multilayered reliefs incorporating both right-angled and curvilinear forms. For example, Angel (2000) consists of three layers of open triangles, trapezoids, parallelograms and pentagons, once again made of wood.

In the middle 1980s, Gummer began to make many of his sculptures in bronze. He had become interested in producing pieces that could be installed outdoors and would withstand weather. In using bronze, Gummer adopted a medium rejected by the Minimalists and many of their modernist precursors, and joined such sculptors as Joel Shapiro, Nancy Graves and Bryan Hunt. (l) Gummer has continued to cultivate many of the traditional qualities of sculpture. Peter Plagens characterized Gummer's works as "spatial fugues on the perennial dualities of sculpture of whatever century, period, style, or fashion: Straight/ curved, open/closed, symmetrical/asymmetrical, and most important, completeness/ incompleteness. The last is the most important because it's the quality that draws the viewer into the work again and again." (2)