Together features twelve new ceramic and steel sculptures by New York-based artist Arlene Shechet at the gallery’s temporary location in East Hampton.
Completed at the artist’s home and studio in Woodstock, New York, during the global coronavirus pandemic, Together offers a window into the artist’s work during these past months of quarantine, exploring how art might continue to serve as a source of visual and spiritual nourishment. The works are titled after the hours of the day. Collectively, they allude to the medieval Book of Hours, offering the artist a way of marking time while inventing a new sculptural lexicon of chromatic and textural richness.
Together evolved out of a conscious decision by Shechet to resist the urge to make work that reflected her own darkening mood during the early days of the pandemic. In the artist’s words, “Instead of making things that reflected how I felt, I decided to make things that reflected what I needed: color therapy.” On a more intimate scale than previous recent works, she marries form with seductively textured applications of saturated color, creating works that allow viewers to access the radiant pleasures of their own bodies—of simply being present in the moment. Activating a visceral response, Shechet’s works resemble that of a portrait bust, yet unlike classical sculpture, they have no front or back. The liveliness involved in any encounter with Shechet’s sculptures suggests the sense of hope she finds in the continued possibilities and pleasures of communicating through art.
The sculptures in the exhibition build on some of the same technical and aesthetic breakthroughs seen in Skirts, her recent debut show with Pace Gallery in New York. Deep Dive (2020), a work featured in Skirts, employed a unique glazing technique that the artist invented over long hours of trial and error, and which she described as a “once in a lifetime” discovery. The works in Together attempt to build upon the lessons learned through this technically-demanding method of glazing, which produces a thickly layered, densely textured surface with a wide spectrum of coloristic possibilities. Color is an integral part of Arlene’s work; her new show hones into this particular aspect with intensity, as each piece is a consolidation of colors that burst with life. Through striking glazes, Shechet combines bold and effusive color combinations with a complex language of sculptural forms that she has been gradually developing over a long period of time.
The way Shechet’s ceramic bodies exist in space is completed through their cantilevered postures on colored steel supports. These painted and powder-coated supports are essential to the works, expanding beyond a structural role and serving as a further reflection of Shechet’s merging of color and form through their intentional hues and finishes. Each supporting surface is as carefully considered as the artist’s glazed surfaces, and in all cases some part of the ceramic form is harnessed by the structural support, while another part is set free from the colored steel.
Highlights from the series include Together: 7.a.m. (2020), the first work that Shechet completed, whose thick layer of neon orange glaze is gilded with an iridescent sheen of chartreuse, suggesting the colors from the artist’s moss garden in Woodstock. Similarly vibrant, Together: 5.p.m. (2020) resembles an organ excised from an unknown or alien body, its electric yellow glaze resembling pollen flocking, while a series of orifices display the unknown darkness in the work’s interior. All of Shechet’s works are hollow, possessing one or more internal spaces and visible cavities, which contrast with their velvet exteriors.
In the past, Shechet has resisted thinking about her sculptures as belonging to a series or body of work. The cohesive qualities of the works in Together emerged organically through the course of her experimentation in the studio following a long, fallow period of inactivity during the early months of the pandemic. The titles are evocative, having suggested themselves only after the works’ completion, and as such do not represent any kind of chronology for their making. Like time itself, the artworks in Together are at once abstract and concrete. While they came into a coherent series over the course of recent months, they remain anchored within a longer arc of artistic development that runs through the whole of Shechet’s practice as an ongoing process of discovery and invention.
