Oakland, California
This posthumous mini-retrospective of renowned California sculptor Bella Feldman (on view through May 2, 2026) provides a rare opportunity to see the full range of her profoundly political, metaphorical objects grounded in global art history. Feldman (1930–2024) focused on the big issues—feminism, war, ecology—addressing her subject matter with acerbic wit and subtle humor in tough-minded and provocative works totally lacking in cynicism. Her deeply Kafka-esque vision—a strange blend of metaphysics, the surreal, and poetic disjunction—is achieved through material acuity and the fluid ability to associate those materials with states of mind and socio-cultural touchstones. Firmly rooted in the worlds of both imagination and reality, her sculptures function as a kind of anti-didactic testament to the relevance of art as well as a guide for surviving patriarchy, bad politicians, and acts of war. They can be seen as an attempt to create an alternative visual set of principles, a fantasy world that remodels the real as a way of clarifying and making sense of things seemingly beyond our control.
Drawing equally from the junkyard, steelyard, and glassblowing studio, Feldman’s sculptures deliberately work against the cool of post-modernism to produce a deeply psychological response. Varying from the monumental to the hand-held, these works are uncategorizable, with influences that include toys, medieval armor, African art, constructivism, and feminist aesthetics. The materials are just as wide-ranging, from cast and blown glass, steel, and wire rope to cast metal and found objects. Feldman employs the characteristics of these materials in ways that often seem contradictory. From heavy yet delicate large-scale steel pieces that rock or roll on wheels to adorable but physically threatening small objects, her works always engage the viewer’s body. Merging the biological with the mechanical, her forms and materials are united not by commonalities such as appearance but by how they inflect history and social conditions. To paraphrase the beginning of Franz Kafka’s story “The Penal Colony,” Feldman’s work are “remarkable pieces of apparatus.”
Like the Surrealists, Feldman merges dream and reality. Her objects clearly embody the ethos of Lautréamont’s remark about the beauty of a “chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” Navigator (1996), one of the most striking pieces in the show, pairs the hilariously absurd and the erotic. Consisting of rusted steel slats conjoined into a large-scale semi-circular form, it stands with its curved side on the ground, surmounted by a tablature of erect cast penises. When the piece is rocked, the cleverly gimbled penises wave in the opposite direction.
The “War Toy” series, perhaps the most extraordinary of all the works that Feldman produced over the course of her career, consists of a group of small, mixed-media pieces that evoke the erotic undercurrents of wartime rhetoric and paraphernalia. The series was inspired by President George H.W. Bush’s speech about Patriot missiles broadcast during the Gulf War’s first massive bombardments. Although Feldman had always been interested in machinery and armor, Bush’s speech made her realize why “the sharp, the dangerous, the glow of metal…. is so attractive.” These small armament-like forms combine the organic with the inorganic in a way that presages the bionic ordnance of the present. Cute, ferocious, and slyly alluring, they neatly summarize the union of sex and aggression that typifies not only weapons of destruction, but also most late-20th and early 21st-century design.
