Seattle
Lauren Grossman’s current exhibition, “Talk Show” (on view through November 29, 2025), picks up where her 2023 retrospective “Pillar of Salt/A Glance Back” left off, presenting 18 new sculptures that explore Judeo-Christian texts and imagery. Grossman’s early works were clearly indebted to Old and New Testament narratives, depicting scenes such as Susanna and the Elders and the Crucifixion, as well as stories of the lives, martyrdoms, and miracles of the saints. The figurative imagery in these ceramic, metal, and glass works was clear-cut, colorful, and often humorous.
For the past decade or more, however, and culminating in the current work, this clarity of subject matter has been progressively subsumed by a greater abstraction of means that strengthens formal qualities and dissipates any easy visual storytelling. For instance, Susanna Revisited (2023), unlike the original figurative Susanna and the Elders (1988), pairs the façade of a bare-breasted torso with a jumble of clay letters rising up behind—presumably the voyeuristic elders and their false speech. More immediately powerful as an object and less anecdotal than earlier works, Susanna Revisited follows a strategy that Grossman has used since 2002, transferring the burden of narrative from representation to allusion through the use of letters, excerpted from particular stories, as compositional elements and supports.
Like Susanna Revisited, many of the works here—including Maid, Specimen, Murmur, Genesis Object, and She-Ass—employ illegible letters as indicators of a particular narrative, though these signs of language communicate very little in and of themselves without the support of a clear title or explanatory labeling. In She-Ass (2024), for instance, a braying donkey muzzle propped up on flimsy struts, spews clouds of tangled letters from both ends, another cluster hanging overhead; Grossman gives a biblical source for the work, but absent that knowledge, the work makes a compelling statement on its own, leading the viewer to follow various possible avenues of thought.
Murmur (2025), at 11 feet high, commands the gallery with a clump of illegible colored plastic lettering fluttering near the ceiling, ascending from a metal trunk rooted in a found industrial trolley. Wheeled supports become a formal sub-theme here, the mobility of the object underscoring each fragile structure. Like Ginny Ruffner and Petah Coyne, Grossman, through her provisional, see-through assemblages, is deconstructing the masculine monumentality long considered endemic to important sculpture, and to speech.
Cocked (2020), with its cage of interlocking steel rods, summons up the classical sculptural convention of contrapposto; bending to one side, the viewer vicariously enters into dialogue with the captive figure, complete with black cast-iron ears. Metal rod constructions continue in wall-mounted and pedestal works, including Mr. and Mrs. Job (2023), Justification (2025), Demand with a Tuffet (2025), and, amusingly, Construction (2024), with its repurposing of Erector set parts. In some of these works, Grossman has tied tiny red or blue torn cotton scraps, as if to stand in for anatomical joints.
After the Manner of Women, Two Nations, and Hedge (all 2025), like Murmur, stress verticality in order to redefine monumentality. The first two continue the use of greater color, partly with the cotton ties and partly with found, moveable bases. In these works, the letters become increasingly secondary, and the references to specific biblical dialogues (between Sarah and God, Rebecca and God, between God and Satan) increasingly opaque.
A lengthy interview with art historian Peter Gaučys in the “Pillar of Salt/A Glance Back” exhibition catalogue placed Grossman front and center in terms of explicating (or at times, obfuscating) her complicated work, revealing the importance of her content, as well as her ambivalence about alternate interpretations. And yet without the assistance of explanation, many of her meanings remain obscure—a result that stems in equal measure from the fact that, for most people, these stories are no longer familiar and that the works have abandoned the norms of narrative art for something more abstract, allusive, and formally inventive. These are works that seem to invite interpretation, without restriction. One wonders what would happen if Grossman continued in this formal direction without the restriction of biblical narrative and the imposition of letters.
