Tender, Biting Tours de Force

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The New York Sun

Marisol Escobar and Tom Otterness are exemplars of a rich vein in modern American sculpture that combines social satire and effusive warmth. Marisol (Ms. Escobar exhibits under her first name) is an elder statesman of this tradition; Mr. Otterness a relative young Turk. They are both subjects of significant new shows.

Mr. Otterness’s show, a display of seven monumental bronzes, inaugurates the Marlborough Gallery’s new space in Chelsea. “Marisol: Works 1960-2007,” meanwhile, is this artist’s first New York exhibition since leaving Marlborough, where she last showed in 1998. She was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Neuberger Museum in Purchase, N.Y., in 2001. This latest exhibition, curated by Carter Ratcliff, surveys a similar period, entirely from the artist’s studio.

Marisol’s social vision is at once tender and biting. Her sculptural language combines primitivism and sophistication, a timeless, childlike exuberance, and a cool aloofness. She both assembles ready-made elements or found blocks or planks, leaving them in their raw state, and works expressively into these supports by hand, carving in the round or drawing or painting surfaces. She does not come across, however, as a dualist; instead, there is a kind of feline fusion of cuddliness and cruelty.

Born in Paris of nomadic high society Venezuelans, Marisol made her career in New York after coming to study here in 1949 with Hans Hofmann. She was part of the Pop Art movement more by personal connection than stylistic affinity. She was in harmony with an earlier sensibility possessed by artists such as Larry Rivers, Alex Katz, and the sculptor William King — who was her teacher as well as another exemplar of a socially astute revisiting of Americana — artists whose cool realism with a naïve edge came to be called handmade pop. Marisol’s sculpture of the 1960s often combined a rough, primitive quality, directly derived from the pre-Colombian art she studied, or from Egyptian art, and loosely recollected other vernacular, folk and outsider traditions. The gay abandon with which she put together found objects and mediated elements also recalled Robert Rauschenberg’s contemporaneous combines.

Marisol hit upon a unique mode of portraiture that combined personal and impersonal features. “Couple 1” (1965), which greets the visitor to the gallery, is at once hieratic and casual, schematic and observational, frontal and in the round. It consists of two conjoined block of wood with funnel-like shapes as the heads. The front surfaces are metallic with the legs burnished, and depicted volumetrically, while the man’s sweater and the woman’s shoes are painted, and flat. The heads, meanwhile, are strikingly gendered: Hers is a black concave disk, rather like a loudspeaker, while his is a plastic cone protruding several feet, and kept afloat by pumped air (the piece is plugged in).

A mix of generalizing abstraction for the body and individualizing expressive touches for the features, reached its apogee in the raucous yet movingly dignified portrait of the South African activist and bishop, “Desmund Tutu” (1988). Here the body is a mammoth rectangular slab loosely painted in a saturated Episcopal purple. The bespectacled and jovial head, neckless and sunk into its trunk, is rough hewn from a different, darker wood, as is the hand firmly gripping his protruding staff. Here the solidity of the bishop’s torso conveys different meanings. There is mirth in this girth, but it also seems to signify the solidarity and tradition that is the bedrock of the bishop’s authority.

A recent report on the state of the Smithsonian Institution earlier this year recommended that the National Portrait Gallery and the American Art Museum, which share a building, should merge. Marisol’s “The Funeral” (1996), a poignant and stirring piece, reminded me of this argument, as it is a work that would sit superbly in either collection. It is a portrait of John F. Kennedy Jr. as a boy saluting at his father’s funeral. The presidential procession of mounted police, marching servicemen, and draped cortege are in tiny doll-like figures at the younger Kennedy’s feet and recalls the mystical, outsider works that are a hallmark of the American Art Museum.

A number of smaller pieces dated from between 1964 and 2007 suggest a slowing of pace in recent years, adding accoutrements to life masks, for instance, which were a hallmark of Marisol’s earlier work. But her last ambitious, original piece on display here is still a showstopper: In “Mimi” (1997), a mixed media work in wood, metal, plaster, and charcoal, closely observed personal features, a generalized carving of a bicycle and an umbrella, and found handle bars, manage at once to flow together fluently and stand out abrasively. This back-andforth between innocence and experience, and naturalism and assemblage, puts her late teacher Hofmann’s dictum of “push-pull” into three dimensions.

It is hard to imagine any slackening of productivity ever affecting Mr. Otterness. This artist has made capitalist consumption his satiric subject matter and is himself a captain of a one-man industry. He is a phenomenally successful and popular public artist, working large scale in gorgeously crafted, luxuriously polished bronze. Coinciding with his gallery show, “Sad Sphere” (2007) is on view at the Waterside Park on Eleventh Avenue as part of the Department of Parks and Recreation’s 40th Anniversary exhibition. A typical Otterness bulbous personage, whose fluid, slightly goofy, state puts you in mind of cartoon animation, is caught in a melancholy pose, hands covering eyes with a cube on his head.

His figures have an appeal that crosses age divisions, managing to be satirical for grown ups and loveable for kids, rather like Mr. Magoo, on whom perhaps the figures were once modeled.

Mr. Otterness’s riff on capitalism represents a kind of agitprop lite. His work is pervaded by as much gentle humanism and good spirit as it is by indignation or fear at the state of the world. Mr. Otterness’s socialism is as unobstructive to broad American enjoyment of his sculpture as L. Frank Baum’s theosophy was to the Wizard of Oz.

A tour de force in this impressive show is a new piece, “The Consumer” (2007), which has a grotesque (yet cuddly) figure sitting on a moneybag with a sharply steeped viaduct and directing a steady flow of industrial trucks shipping heavy goods into his mouth. At the back of the moneybag is an anus, dealing neatly with the conspicuous consumption of the title, but there is also a slot for coins to which a little figure attends. It is unclear, however, whether the coins are going in or out.

Marisol until October 27 (41 E. 57th St. at Madison Avenue, 212-838-1122);

Otterness until November 3 (545 W. 25th St., between Tenth and Eleventh avenues, 212-463-8634).


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