New York
American artist Mark Hadjipateras, of Greek background and now based mostly in Athens, recently put up a terrific show of grisaille paintings and stained aluminum sculptures. The latter are particularly strong, continuing his long-established practice of whimsical artifact. Behind the playfulness, however, viewers will find a formal intelligence that links Hadjipateras in spirit, if not exactly in form, to some of the Modernists, specifically Calder and Jean Arp. In particular, Arp’s preoccupation with the boundaries of abstraction and figuration seems to set a precedent for Hadjipateras’s treatment of organic shapes, which offer a melding of the nonobjective and forms found in nature. As a result, he nicely interprets a cusp that has and will remain important in art—the area where what is visible merges with what is imagined. …see the entire review in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
