Seattle
Greg Kucera Gallery
Recent solo exhibitions bolstered the standing of two of Seattle’s most accomplished sculptors, Dan Webb and Edward Wicklander. Long-term residents of the city, both have shown extensively outside the Pacific Northwest for the past two decades. With the younger Webb, a Cornish College graduate coming off earlier exhibitions in Los Angeles, Miami, and New York, a strong sense of conceptualism underlies over-the-top material handling—in this case, carved wood. Wicklander’s eighth Kucera survey since 1985 also underscored virtuoso studio workmanship—in welded steel and carved wood—but drew from more recognizable imagery. What unites both artists is recourse to an illusionism that grows out of fallback reliance on Surrealism as an inspiration. This shared source both liberates and confines Webb and Wicklander. How buoyant are Wicklander’s seven Steel Balloons? Mounted on a wall or, as in Balloon Quartet (both 2013), suspended on a line, they epitomize his way with material paradoxes and construction, punning strategies, and visual one-liners… see the entire review in the print version of December’s Sculpture magazine
