Finding a Seat Within the Knotted Wire
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Just off Williamsburg’s Bedford Avenue, down a street lined with indie-music clubs, sculptor Forrest Myers lives and works in a low-level building he purchased decades before the neighborhood became a favored destination for the young and arty. Mr. Myers and his wife, Debra, who occupy the top floor, renovated the space themselves and now even the knobs of the kitchen cabinets and drawers are artful: They’re made of Mr. Myers’s signature tangled knots of steel wire. It’s the same aesthetic that is on public view at the Friedman Benda gallery, where Mr. Myers’s “chairs” — some made from woven wire, others of oxidized steel — as well as some of his pivotal early works, such as his stainless steel geometric constructions, are on view.
Mr. Myers, who moved to New York City from California in 1959, was on the vanguard of sculpture’s aggrandizement. During that time, Mr. Myers, like his fellow artists Mark di Suvero, Sir Anthony Caro, and John Chamberlain, produced abstract works on an increasingly larger scale while at the same time shunning the traditional media of bronze and marble in favor of industrial steel, aluminum, pipe, and wire. Mr. Myers participated in the groundbreaking 1966 exhibition, “Primary Structures,” at the Jewish Museum, which put Minimalism on the map. He was also a founding member of the Park Place Gallery, which promoted the installation of monumental outdoor public sculptures. His works are on view at the Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, N.Y., and are part of the permanent collections of both the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Mr. Myers’s “The Wall,” a 13-story relief sculpture located on the side of a SoHo building, is in the process of being restored after years of lawsuits between the landlord, who replaced the sculpture with advertising, and the city’s Landmarks Preservation Commission. But over the decades, Mr. Myers has also pursued sculpture on a smaller, more intimate scale. His pieces visibly resemble furniture, but aren’t meant to be simply functional. Mr. Myers became absorbed with the formal possibilities of furniture making when he first moved to Williamsburg. “My wife and I kept looking for years and years for a couch and finally I made one. And then I decided to make all the furniture,” he said. “As I was doing so, I realized that what I was making was abstract sculpture that becomes figurative when someone sits on it.”
“Comfort is not one of our issues,” Mr. Myers said, speaking of artists who pursue their creative visions through otherwise functional objects. Gesturing toward one of his chairs, a gloriously tangled weave of silvery steel wire molded to roughly conform to the shape of a traditional wingback chair, he said, “These things are for your mind, not your derriere.” The pieces are substantial, strong enough to support the weight of a human, yet, due to the intricate weaving and knotting of wire, achieve an airiness not unlike a piece of crocheted wool. “The pieces are big drawings. I’m drawing, not on paper, but in space,” Mr. Myers said.
Some of Mr. Myers’s furniture has a playful, humorous quality, especially when he uses anodized aluminum in bright, shiny hues of fuchsia or turquoise. Other pieces are more sober, such as “Parker,” currently on view at the gallery, which maintains the shape of a chair, while its agitated linear energy gives the appearance of form dissolving. Mr. Myers bends the wire with his hands, but shapes it into forms using various methods. “I have different kinds of mallets that I hit the wire with, one of which looks like a cricket bat. I roll over it with my car. I’ve even had a steamroller run over it,” he said. Mr. Myers views his furniture as small environments with a phenomenological component comparable to that offered by Richard Serra’s monumental steel plates. When seated in the chair, a person feels enveloped by the work rather than remaining an outsider to the creative process.
One of Mr. Myers’s favorite pieces, “Picasso and Myers,” is a sculpture made up of two white chairs constructed from planar surfaces of white painted steel. “My chair is folded out of a single piece of material and the other is based on a chair that I saw at the Picasso Museum years ago. The seat was slanted and the back portion was folded — you couldn’t sit in it,” he said. “I had also made chairs that were dysfunctional. Like mine, it was a sculpture that looked like a chair. I made Picasso’s chair more functional and the two forms are meant to have a dialogue.”
“Artists do compete. They want to be the best,” Mr. Myers said. “But they are also great explorers. They take man somewhere he hasn’t been before. In transforming furniture into art, I’m trying to take art somewhere it hasn’t been before.”
Until December 20 (515 W. 26th St., 212-239-8700).