New York
Tanya Bonakdar Gallery
Ernesto Neto’s woven, hanging sculptures show us how a playful understanding of Modernist aesthetics can advance the art of sculpture. His works in this show, crocheted from polypropylene and polyester cord, hung from the ceiling, in some cases filled with plastic balls, which acted as a balance and also as a floor for visitors to rather shakily walk across. The shapes themselves, often comically organic, seem to have been inspired by folk art, or the work of aliens, and so we struggle to comprehend the art of a culture whose artifacts we have not yet contextualized. Neto has made a career out of this kind of hanging, which effectively broaches the gap between sculpture and installation. He is concerned with environments that the viewer can touch, so the experience of his work is interactive, even incorporating a bit of performance. Much of today’s best art falls in between genres, for example, the sculptural paintings of Elizabeth Murphy. In Neto’s work, we find a similar aesthetic: art that draws its interest from more than one medium, skillfully incorporating different elements to produce something larger than the sum of its descriptions. …see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.
