Springfield, Massachusetts
George Walter Vincent Smith Art Museum
Gloria Garfinkel’s recent exhibition featured a strong selection of sculptures, paintings, and works on paper, particularly the “Hanabi” series, based on origami forms, and the “Flip” series, made of aluminum. Both groups exemplify her interest in painted surfaces made more complex by folds, either structural or painterly. In some ways, Garfinkel comes from the great American Modernist sculptural tradition initiated by David Smith, oriented toward a frontal presentation. At the same time, of course, she is deeply interested in a decorative exterior; her finish is painterly, much more so than Smith’s polished surfaces. The brightly colored, highly patterned exteriors also have a precedent in feminist pattern art, first produced in the 1960s and ’70s. In the smallish to mid-size “Hanabi” works, individual planes, painted differently on each side of the aluminum, are put together in ways that bridge the gap between sculpture and painting. …see the entire review in the print version of November’s Sculpture magazine.
