13/6/2008
Sarah Braman
Museum 52, New York
Love songs. The works in the show combine found furniture, linoleum, a camping tent and car panels with wood, plexiglas and paint. The materials used have a sense of lost and found or something fallen and risen again.
Museum 52 are delighted to present a show of large-scale sculptures by Sarah Braman. The
exhibition will be shown over both floors of the gallery. In the work for the show Braman allows
the incongruous to coalesce with an elegant, human clumsiness in three large-scale pieces.
Braman has an instinctive admiration for inept materials. The works in the show combine found
furniture, linoleum, a camping tent and car panels with wood, plexiglas and paint. Braman
appears to work without inhibition, second-guessing or self-consciousness. Each material, as
with a fault or quality in a lover, is celebrated equally for its flaws and its successes. It is as if she
approaches the works with the same mix of vehemence and disregard of someone penning a
love song.
The materials used have a sense of lost and found or something fallen and risen again. The
instinctual manner of her process is akin to the inherent resourcefulness of a child building a
den or the dislocated building a new home. Braman embraces the very human need and
ability to reconstruct and piece together. Her work acts likes gestures towards shelter. Creating
intimate volumes she reformulates materials and space for the better. In one of the sculptures
an unattached, thick, foam rectangle sits beneath an off kilter square formed from a large sheet
of plexi and a half broken, half cut desk. The form becomes both a refuge and negative
space. By intuitively adding paint to the sculptures, Braman emphasizes this divide in the formal
reading. The paint presents another human need to decorate and embellish, as well as
highlighting structural elements such as joints and surfaces. It is as if, in the departure of the
sculptures into abstraction, Braman gives a reminder of the hand that put them there.
This is not sculpture based on either/or decisions.
Beautifully composed interlocking planes,
and subtle contrasts of light and color are built of roughly cut materials, balanced on awkward
angles, loosely painted and combined with sagging cloth. The works are not concerned with all
that is wrong and all that is right with sculpture, but instead oppose such finitudes, allowing a
freedom to exist within the knowledge that the finite has been decided for us anyway.
Braman is one of the founders of CANADA gallery in New York where she has had two solo
exhibitions. She has also exhibited at Dicksmith Gallery in London, Michael Kohn Gallery, LA,
Counter Gallery, London and the ICA, Philadelphia. She was included in Greater New York at
PS1 in 2005. Braman lives and works between New York and Amherst, MA.
Opening june 14, 2008
Museum 52
95 Rivington Street at Ludlow - New York