Miami
MDC Museum of Art + Design
Robert Thiele, who splits his time between Miami and Brooklyn, has been making art since the mid-1960s. Simultaneously sculptural and painterly, obfuscating and revealing, his works, which range from small, wall-mounted pieces to tall, imposing sculptures, abound with paradoxes. “Untitled (3 for 8),” a selection of works from the early 1980s to the present, revealed Thiele’s dialectics — intimacy/monumentality, surface/depth, dependence/autonomy, old/new — to be part of the same continuum. The installation of the works contributed to this revelation. Occupying several symmetrically arranged galleries, the show could be entered through two separate spaces. In each of them, 10 small sculptures hung on a wall in a neat line. Some shared characteristics emerged from these painted wood pieces: faintly irregular, elliptical, and anthropomorphic shapes that hint at faces and figures, a neutral palette, holes that break the surface, and a careful yet imperfect application of paint that alters our perception of the forms and gives them a weathered appearance. …see the entire review in the print version of April’s Sculpture magazine.
