Seattle
Leo Saul Berk’s recent exhibition “Structure and Ornament” featured a series of sculptural installations commissioned by the Frye Art Museum and Frye Foundation. In an unusually apt interface between an artist and the museum’s permanent collection of 19th-century German art, director Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker linked Berk’s variations on his childhood home (eccentric architect Bruce Goff’s Ford House in Aurora, Illinois) to the Frye’s substantial holdings of the multi-disciplinary Munich Secession. Most of the 14 separate works, including sculptures, video projections, geometric metal chimneys, backlit light boxes, and outdoor water elements, will outlast such comparisons and contextual defenses (all of which were detailed by Berk and assorted architectural and art historians). Berk wrote 16 lengthy wall labels to accompany his works. Such determined verbiage left little wiggle-room for the viewer, however, unless he or she ignored them. …see the entire review in the print version of January/February’s Sculpture magazine.
