Charlottetown Prince Edward Island, Canada
Confederation Centre of the Arts
Much discussion about the history of 20th-century sculpture has focused on its emergence from under the shadow of painting. With Minimalism’s return to the object, the conversation with painting suddenly seemed irrelevant. Yet, as with so much in art, conversations never truly end, they evolve and spiral in new directions. The work of Brooklyn artist Rachel Beach appears, at first glance, to be a manner of painting in three-dimensional space. But her recent exhibition, “Mid-Sentence,” which I first saw in Halifax at the Saint Mary’s University Art Gallery, offered a conversation about paintings as objects, and the history it cited is, of necessity, more complex than the translation of Modernist ideas from two to three dimensions, a strategy that marked so much sculpture from the first half of the 20th century…see the entire review in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
