ASHLEY KISTLER

Disguise the Limits: Sculpture & Drawing by John Newman

The Hand Workshop Art Center's exhibition of work by New York artist John Newman coincides with the installation of his public art commission for Richmond's new Main Street Station. For that downtown site, Newman created a 22-foot-high airborne sculpture entitled Skyrider, which now floats beneath the crisscrossing network of overpasses and train trestles across from the station. He used an earlier piece, Homespun (with travel notes), as a conceptual point of departure, translating its component parts into monumental forms fabricated in aluminum. Featuring this and other works produced by the artist over the last five years, Disguise the Limits provides a broader context in which to consider his Main Street Station commission.

Born in 1952, Newman came of age during an era when Minimalism and its spare geometric forms held sway. "When I was a student," he says, "it was all about being essential and exclusive and refined and simple in a formal sense." Newman's subsequent development as a sculptor reverses that headlong movement, embracing a process that is additive rather than subtractive, intuitive rather than cerebral. His work opens up an imaginative space, as writer Raphael Rubinstein described it, "in which unexpected conjunctions are the rule, in which theory bows to intuition and humor, and associative imagery runs riot." From Italian Baroque statuary to Alexander Calder's delicately balanced sculptures and John Chamberlain's exuberant found-metal assemblages, he has drawn inspiration from disparate sources as he freely improvises and invents.

Newman's ever-expanding repertoire of materials and techniques has been shaped in part by his extensive travels in India, China, Japan, and Africa and the local craftspeople he encountered there. With unexpected results that include illusionistic effects more often associated with painting, he employs an astonishing array of ingredients either derived from indigenous handicrafts, fabricated in the studio, or collected as found objects. Newman has described his sculptures as complex, awkward, funny, strange, and itchy. In terms of both material and image, he also calls them slippery. "Sometimes I really like the fact that you have no idea what a work is made of, or how it was made," he says, "let alone what it is. All that slipperiness is part of the piece." These qualities jostle each other in his idiosyncratic creations so that we can never quite name what appears before us, though we are compelled to try and do so.

Drawing has always constituted a fundamental aspect of Newman's artistic practice. "Drawing allowed me to create a vocabulary and to set up the challenge of using new materials," he notes. While this activity sometimes becomes an integral element within the sculptures themselves, more often it functions as a kind of sculptural conceit. Adroit at moving between two and three dimensions as well as between materials, Newman renders improbable forms and structures on paper and then proceeds to build them, addressing engineering challenges as formidable as Piranesi's 18th–century architectural labyrinths might pose. "A drawing can also be a provocation, a spatial impossibility," he continues, "and a call to materially manifest that impossibility in real space."

Newman borrowed the title he has given this exhibition from a work by sculptor John Chamberlain, and it reflects his longstanding fondness for puns. On the one hand, Disguise the Limits evokes the exigencies inherent in the sculptural process, whether it is undertaken on an intimate or a monumental scale. In keeping with his notion of sculpture as "an instrument of contemplation," Newman's title also alludes to the objective of creating, for both maker and viewer, an open-ended realm in which the sky's the limit.  

John Newman's Disguise the Limits showed at the Hand Workshop Art Center in Richmond, Virginia, from November 17, 2003 - January 18, 2004.