Steven Singer at Denise Bibro - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions

Art in America, Dec, 1994 by Gerrit Henry

Steven Singer's most ambitious and exceptional steel sculpture to date could not be included in his Bibro show, mainly due to its size. It is a larger-than-life, full-body study of a homeless woman, seated on a set of steps, the picture of rejection and dejection, existing somewhere beyond misery. The sculptor, who is in his 40s, studied art at Dartmouth; when he chooses to be, he is a master of a kind of monumental figurative sculpture that has its roots in the late work of Rodin. Bibro's classic small space presented him at his most innovative, contemporary and diminutive.

The artist finds many of the miscellaneous steel items that go into his best miniatures near his Brooklyn studio. Often he uses debris from under the Brooklyn Bridge. But origin never determines use: steel pipes, tubing, outsized nails, bolts and discarded grilles are transformed by a kind of wittily manic alchemical process in which he cuts, hammers and welds old steel around the found objects to produce rough and suggestive forms. The viewer is left delightedly gape-jawed at, for instance, a Baroque Heart looking very much like that bodily organ yet with its taproots in Giacometti, Arp and David Smith. The late Jonathan Silver, a brilliant semi-figurative sculptor also comes to mind.

However, unlike Silver's haunting personages, Singer's smaller works are not studies in Michelangelesque tragedy, but sly, seductive, curiously triumphant visual puns on their own "junk" nature. A 6-by-12-by-4-inch Sphinx from 1992 is a reclining female whose knees are bent and who has risen up on her elbows. The sinuous languor of her pose coexists amusingly with the hard, uncomfortable angularity of the bolts, spikes and hammered steel of which she is made.

Also included in the show was a small bronze made in an edition of 10 - a burly workman who holds on for dear life to his Jackhammer. He's a little colossus of a guy whose upper torso is running to bulbuous, still-muscled fat and whose blunt-featured face speaks volumes on the inhuman rigors of his occupation - but the work also projects a sense of devilish good fun, as well as Singer's somewhat standoffish compassion.

Perhaps the most affecting works in the show were three Stele a Go-Go. On each stele is a welded-steel female head with determined-looking but vaguely tortured physiognomy. Together the three address one of the problems of late-poth-century identity: the emphasis on keen individuality that results in uniformity. Singer is an inspired and versatile contributor to the New York scene. Now, if he can just get that humongous bag lady - an exercise in death-defying terror - on view, and soon.