Lori Bookstein Fine Art is pleased to announce "Garth Evans: Sculpture from the Late 1980s,” an exhibition of free-standing and wall-mounted sculpture representing a body of work completed between 1986 and 1989. The fourteen pieces on view exemplify Evans’ unique process of combining cardboard, resin and fiberglass to create angular but unusual geometric forms. This is the artist’s second solo show of sculpture at Lori Bookstein, following upon the life-size floor works exhibited in 2006.
Although Evans’ entire career has been dedicated to working in the abstract, his sculpture is frequently evocative of the physical world. The complexity and variety of the wall pieces – many are dense and volumetric, others contain mysterious voids within collapsed structures – are rife with allusions to animals and things. A highly individuated treatment of color, produced both from bright papers embedded in the resin and paint applied to the surface, compounds the sense of each sculpture’s distinct personality.
Writing in a 1988 catalogue essay for the Yale Center for British Art, Dore Ashton encapsulates the viewer’s navigation between the abstract materiality of these pieces and their metaphorical associations. Of her initial encounter with “Mrs. Turpin’s Pig,” a floor work, she writes:
“I first saw it as a melting pink glow of light and then as an abstract configuration of basically rectangular forms. Then, almost immediately, I saw it, with its pearly pink surface and its faint pentimento of drawing, just beneath the skin, so to speak, as an almost organic – uncomfortably organic – object. In its perverse contraposto (I was, after all, looking down on it) this reclining object could find no name, and yet was insistently suggestive. As I moved about surveying the volumes, they moved also and appeared almost like a reclining figure. Surpassingly strange. Not geometric. Not organic. Not non-organic.”
Garth Evans was born in Cheshire, England in 1934. He studied at the Manchester College of Art and the Slade School of Fine Art, and had his first one-person show in 1962 at London’s Rowan Gallery, where he exhibited for two decades. Evans’ was a lecturer at St. Martin's School of Art from 1965 to 1979, when he moved to the United States. Additional academic appointments include the Camberwell School of
