San Francisco
Hackett | Mill Gallery
The tradition of Constructivism is still with us and remains especially strong in the San Francisco Bay Area with two outstanding sculptors—Brian Wall and Fletcher Benton. Wall, whose early work was recently shown in Hackett | Mill Gallery’s “Brian Wall: Spatial Planes 1957– 1966,” was born in London in 1931 and moved to St. Ives in 1954, where he became an assistant to Barbara Hepworth the following year. Hepworth and her husband (England’s foremost abstract painter, Ben Nicholson) were friends of Naum Gabo, a leader of the Constructivist movement in Moscow, who moved to St. Ives at the beginning of World War II and remained there until 1946. There is little doubt that Constructivist theory and praxis had an impact on the young Wall, whose sculpture defines the space it occupies. .…see the entire review in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
