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24/3/2002

Ilan Averbuch

Nancy Hoffman Gallery, New York

Nancy Hoffman Gallery presents new sculpture and drawings by Ilan Averbuch, opening on March 23rd and continuing through April 20th. The exhibition consists of three distinct and different sculptural installations; the totality the most massive and heroic of Averbuch's works to date. For the first time, Averbuch's three installations together form an intriguing comment on creation or paradise. In the "Bible" the "forest" that gave shelter to man in his state of bliss, hid among its trees the forbidden fruits of knowledge and life. Man lived at that time through his senses. Awakening, followed by the expulsion of man, came from the "snake"--the symbol of the code of life. It is interesting to walk among the installations and ponder these underlying themes.

THE FOREST consists of four massive glass and steel columns topped by capitals of stone, lead and wood. The glass of each column is inscribed with a fragment from four great works of literature, "pillars" of writing: the "Bible," "Crime and Punishment," "One Hundred Years of Solitude" and "The Little Prince."

Atop each column is a different capital, an archetypal image; a pomegranate adorns the column with writing from St. Exupery's "The Little Prince," inscribed on the inside of the glass, and, thus, read backwards by the viewer, as is true on the other columns. A palm tree grows out of the column with words from Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude." Stone grapes top the epilogue of Fyodor Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment."

And finally, a sheaf of wheat is the image of the Promised Land from the "Bible." THE FOREST is a grove rich with image and literary inspiration--one of Averbuch's main sources and resources for his sculpture.

The second grouping is a five-part piece of THE SENSES. Each sense is carved out of a single piece of granite; each measures approximately 4x5 feet, and most of them lie flat on a base, like a landscape perched on wooden legs. THE SENSES parade through space in random fashion. As the artist monumentalizes the senses--through which we perceive the world and through which he creates his work--he connects them with the landscape. The Nose looks like an island, the Lips like a dune. Though joined as a group and a concept, each of THE SENSES functions on its own as an individual sculpture. In a catalogue essay on the artist, Carter Ratcliff wrote...
"in part his sculptures owe their monumental aura to their materials--stone, copper, lead, heavy wooden beams. In greater part, this aura is created by his themes--civilization and its history, its interactions with nature. Yet the deepest power of Averbuch's art is its truly convincing monumentality, the product of qualities that we ordinarily consider anti-monumental. A monument of the usual sort has a single message, simply stated. Sculpture of this sort presents its single-mindedness as a claim to authority. The authority of an Averbuch monument is quite different, for it flows from a refusal to advance just one idea. As we have seen, his images not only permit, they demand, multiple readings. He is a master of ambiguity, of the richness of meaning that engages the imagination and prompts it to follow cues in every direction, as far as our energies will take us. Always subtle, he is often playful, and his art never permits us to be certain even about such seemingly simple matters as formal resemblance."

The third grouping is entitled DREAM OF TWO SNAKES based on James Watson's dream and the discovery of the double helix. Out of this dream came the idea of two intertwined snakes. Averbuch has entwined them with glass, presenting them as two primal forces, one going up and one going down. He depicts this struggle of two forces in granite and glass in monumental scale with the piece measuring 8 x 19 feet. Though stone, Averbuch makes the curves of the snake appear sinuous as they arc upward in space, creating arches tall enough to walk through. But each potential walkway is occupied with a majestic panel of glass. The snakes are simultaneously inviting and ominous, creatures of power.

Averbuch's sculptures, as Carter Ratcliff states, "permit multiple readings." The manifest content is not the artist's sole intent. His interests are multi-faceted as are the levels of meaning in his works; they are broad, subtle and wide-ranging. It is in the eye of the beholder to read the depths that Averbuch creates in granite, wood, lead, steel and glass. And what he offers is abundant.

Ilan Averbuch's work has been shown at the Arkansas Art Center, Little Rock; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Art in the Park, New York; Bronfman Centre, Montreal; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; DeCordova Museum and Sculpture Garden, Lincoln, Massachusetts; Fort Tryon Park Project, New York; Het Apollohuis, The Netherlands; Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, New York; Hunter College, New York; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Jamaica Art Center, Queens, New York; The Jewish Museum, New York; Katonah Museum of Art, Katonah, New York; Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; Israel Museum, Jerusalem; List Art Center, Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island; Lodz, Poland Historical Museum, Lodz, Poland; Palo Alto Cultural Center, California; P.S. 1, Long Island City, Queens, New York; Robert Moses Plaza, Fordham University at Lincoln Center, New York; Socrates Sculpture Park, Astoria, Queens, New York; Tefen Museum Sculpture Garden, Israel; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Tel Hai Art Center, Israel; Tel Noff Sculpture Garden, Israel.

The artist's work is represented in numerous public collections, among them: The Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Canada; Brock University, Ontario, Canada; Bronfman Centre, Montreal, Canada; Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel; Kunstlerhaus, Bethanien, Berlin, Germany; Prudential Insurance Company of America; Newark, New Jersey; Runnymede Sculpture Farm, Woodside, California; Tefen Museum, Israel; Tel Aviv Museum, Israel; Tel Hai Art Center, Israel; Tel Noff Sculpture Garden, Israel.

Image: Ilan Averbuch, THE FOREST (detail), 1999, steel, glass, stone, wood, lead, 13 x 27 x 27 feet

NANCY HOFFMAN GALLERY, founded in 1972, specializes in contemporary painting, sculpture, drawing, prints and photography.

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