Page 76 - Studio International - April 1968

assurance and its exploration of the obsessive has stood certain American ideas about field- Derek Boshier, whose exhibition was the last that
image, the whole set is dazzling. colour, reductive aesthetics, and particularly the ROBERT FRASER GALLERY seems likely to hold,
uniqueness-through-gigantism, very precisely on has ranged through such wide divergences of
Bearing in mind the implications of Patrick Heron's their heads, and the effect is like someone having idiom since his Royal College of Art days, six to
recent letter in Studio International, I have to record started quite calmly and logically again from eight years ago, that his basic consistency hasn't
that the other most challenging show in London square one, and reaching totally different con- always registered as such. His affiliations with Pop
has also been American. In this case, there has clusions about where one can go from there. Art, combined with what became at times a de-
been no preparatory reputation. Kenneth Price's clamatory kind of optical style, could easily divert
fist-size lacquered ceramic sculpture turned up at Without these two American contributions, recent attention from the fact that his interests were
KASMIN virtually out of the blue. I doubt if more views of the home product might have made a formal, structural and architectural (his earliest
than a dozen people in London had heard of it deeper impression. Michael Bolus's three new student-work was rigidly dictated by the patterns
before or of the artist (born 1935, lives and works sculptures at WADDINGTON'S, in particular, were a of the ludo-board). Working now three-dimen-
in Los Angeles). And if I call the show challenging highly intelligent development along a recogniz- sionally with neon-light and sheets of coloured
it is because it does what American artists still able line of inquiry. He has broken out of his void- plastic, he has finally settled for getting his archi-
seem able, at important moments, to do better than enclosing idiom of the last year or two to stretch tectural inspiration out of architecture—or more
ours, which is to cut right across the more com- out in open-ended space, with the emphasis back precisely, he now relates his formal propositions to
fortable aesthetic assumptions and current dia- where he originally had it, on horizontal extension architectural propositions.
lectics, and to argue out their position in the work and on identification of colour-function with form- His largest recent structure, for example, is
itself by taking it as far as it will go. function (the latter not being, by any means, basically an exercise in inscribing a triangle
Mr Price's objects are little, irregular, flat-based always obvious in recent painted sculpture). Caro within a circle within a square. The square is a
mounds about the size and sometimes the shape of is clearly godfather to these new pieces, with his black podium, the circle a transparent dome, and
a smallish foot. The two most recent are a bit low-slung, horizontally-layered Prairie as a specific the triangle is made of green neon-strip which
kneaded and indented. Three slightly earlier ones direction-pointer. Bolus confirms a general levita- makes reflections like ballooning wraiths inside the
are taut and smooth, with discreet excrescences tional feeling—the feeling of making sculpture not dome. Boshier pays tribute to a drawing by Erich
as though the pulp of an overripe fruit had split the merely in space, but in mid-air—by undemonstra- Mendelsohn (a visionary scribble of the Cleveland
skin and bulged out. All are elaborately lacquered tive but significant details of construction which dome) and titles his piece after the architect. He
to give subtly iridescent depths of colour, and have the effect of holding everything together more does the same with Kenzo, using the Japanese
they are set on white pedestals to be seen at some- by magnetic attraction than by bolts or welding. architect's work as a reference-point for two soar-
thing just below average eye-level. In some ways, And he uses this structural lightness to make the ing black triangles which hold blue light sand-
they are disconcertingly inert and sluggish, in colour work harder. It is becoming a critical cliche wiched between them. Compared to these recent
others closely related to biomorphic surrealism to say that sculptors are now using colour visually, compositions (and the mystically glowing dome
(which has often exploited sluggish shapes). At the like painters, but it's hardly ever true: the colour within a dome of Pentagon), there were some things
same time, their smallness and lustre turn them tends to remain an aid to defining the form, not in the exhibition which remain obviously tentative
into objets de luxe, 'precious' in both senses. And something in its own right that conditions and or experimental, and others which don't so effort-
their viewing-height turns them into objects of shapes the form. Bolus's three pieces are the lessly vindicate the simplicity of their forms and
contemplation, with a strong hint of that oriental- nearest I've seen to the idea of construction by their elementary geometry. But Boshier is clearly
ism which keeps creeping into American West colour. He doesn't so much balance red, yellow turning into a much more austere and, to my
Coast attitudes. With the dwarf Zen gardens and and blue poles on a series of white blocks, as float mind, more interesting kind of artist than his
table-top landscapes of Japan in mind, one reads stripes of primary colour across a ground of pat- previous achievement might have led one to
the scale of these pieces as entirely relative. Price terned white accents. expect. David Thompson

Previous page, left Above left
Andy Warhol 13 most wanted men no. V Arthur Michael Bolus 1967-8
Alvin M 1963 painted aluminium
silkscreen, oil on canvas 48 x 40 in. Waddington Gallery, London
Rowan Gallery, London
Above
Previous page, right Kenneth Price S. D. Violet 1967
Derek Boshier Clear-T 1967 acrylic sheet fired and painted clay, 13 x 7 in.
Robert Fraser Gallery, London Kasmin Gallery, London