Charles Long lovingly stroked Pet Sounds, the music-making, pastel-colored shapes that he created for Madison Square Park, as guests at an opening night dinner awaited his arrival. His “kid” side was showing, but the artist who spoke to me a week earlier was fully adult, neatly classifying, comparing, and justifying the three stages of his career with psychoanalytic rigor: the youth filled with investigative enthusiasm, the “dark night of the soul” in his Los Angeles River pieces, and his present desire to achieve “primary experience” and “presence” in Pet Sounds. Complementing this outdoor work, Long’s recent indoor work, shown at the Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and at the Frieze Art Fair, uses resins on frames to create ethereal and inventive abstractions that seem without antecedent. Long’s career includes solo and group exhibitions at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery since the 1990s, important group exhibitions at the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, and participation in the 1997 and 2008 Whitney Biennials.…see the entire article in the print version of March’s Sculpture magazine.
