East Hampton, New York
Guild Hall, The Roy and Frieda Furman Sculpture Garden
Gloria Kisch’s recent outdoor exhibition in tony East Hampton revisited familiar themes of stamens and pistils, organic matter fashioned in stainless steel. But the works in the show also advanced her investigations by adding touches of metallic color such as bronze to the dullish silver of the steel and pushed her formal concerns toward increasingly quirky results. For example, the 16-foot-tall Golden Fusion, with its three sprawling legs supporting a brass-colored, egg-shaped pod, resembles a giant robotic inset from Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds,” albeit in perhaps not so threatening a manner. If you allow your imagination to drift, Jumping Flower can indeed appear to become animate, its stringy, jerking legs seeming to twitch into motion as the odd floral beast ambles across the meadow, its sharp flower petals held proudly aloft.
Grand Triumphant Flower was the most successful, though not necessarily the most impressive of the 10 featured sculptures here, and the only one based on a previous study—the others were all improvised. Three inch-wide shafts stretch upward, while one flattened leaf gracefully swoops down and a flowering bud crowns the…see the entire review in the print version of July/August’s magazine.
