The usual downside of minimal art is that, after the initial impact, there’s very little to hold one’s visual attention. Michio Ihara confounds that flaw. Though his work appears simple and disciplined—and minimal—even his static pieces offer a great deal to engage the eye and the intellect. Over a four-decade-long career, the Paris-born Japanese-American has married aesthetics, engineering, mathematical design, and beautiful materials in works installed all over the globe. Ihara’s recent retrospective, “Looking Back, Looking Forward,” sampled this vast oeuvre. As part of the show, Concord Art provided a bus tour around the Boston area to visit five of the sculptor’s larger works, some public, some private. Although Ihara’s touch is readily recognizable, it is impossible to nail down one adjective that characterizes his work. Love and respect for his materials is paramount. Some of the work is kinetic, some is not. Huge public pieces for atria and plazas are as meticulously engineered as one-foot-square wall pieces. Yet there is something more, an unerring eye, an infallible sense of the relationship of components. …see the entire review in the print version of May’s Sculpture magazine.
