Helmut Lang

New York City

Mark Fletcher gallery currently shows the exhibition Helmut Lang: Sculptures that investigates the artist’s ongoing explorations into the liminal realm between abstraction and figuration.

Helmut Lang works with form, volume, light and the material history of objects. His materials, including rubber, foam, plaster, sheepskin and tar, often have served previous functions that remain legible in the surfaces of Lang’s art. Discs of rubber that once provided protection are here assembled into a vertical language of figuration. Their softened edges record both the process of erosion and their progression from industrial object to gallery artifact. In Lang’s work the distress of found objects becomes the starting point for a larger meditation on acts of creative destruction and the gestures of reassembly and renewal that attend them.

In a series of white fragmented wall works, Lang achieves pictorial complexity through extreme restraint. The artist heightens the viewer’s sensitivity to subtle variations in the surfaces and materials employed for these objects, as well as the relationship of surface to structure. Lang deflects attention from the ‘picture plane’ of these pieces, de-privileging one side as the face of value: Fleshy bits extrude off the edges of the picture plane of the works, which rest at an angle on visible supports extending from the wall. With a group of freestanding monochrome sculptures, Lang presents his most figurative work. Stacked into unstable totems with undulating skin-like cracks, sags and folds, these works are unified in a light-absorbing, chalky darkness. Their psychosexual content appears formed on the border between the biology of the body and our experience of it, and their priapic tendencies appear at odds with the gravity and gravitas of the dark matter from which they were formed, inviting shifting interpretations.

Mark Fletcher

May 5th – June 15th, 2012
25 Columbus Circle
New York, NY 10019
USA

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