PVC Abstract Sculptures

William King (1925-2015). Reclining figure, ca. 1965. Cast and welded bronze, 7 x 9.5 x 5 inches. Unsigned. William King, a sculptor in a variety of materials whose human figures traced social attitudes through the last half of the 20th century, often poking sly and poignant fun at human follies and foibles, died on March 4 at his home in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 90. His death was confirmed by Scott Chaskey, who is married to Mr. King's stepdaughter, Megan Chaskey. Mr. King worked in clay, wood, bronze, vinyl, burlap and aluminum. He worked both big and small, from busts and toylike figures to large public art pieces depicting familiar human poses -- a seated, cross-legged man reading; a Western couple (he in a cowboy hat, she in a long dress) holding hands; a tall man reaching down to tug along a recalcitrant little boy; a crowd of robotic-looking men walking in lock step. But for all its variation, what unified his work was a wry observer's arched eyebrow, the pointed humor and witty rue of a fatalist. His figurative sculptures, often with long, spidery legs and an outlandishly skewed ratio of torso to appendages, use gestures and posture to suggest attitude and illustrate his own amusement with the unwieldiness of human physical equipment. His subjects included tennis players and gymnasts, dancers and musicians, and he managed to show appreciation of their physical gifts and comic delight at their contortions and costumery. His suit-wearing businessmen often appeared haughty or pompous; his other men could seem timid or perplexed or awkward. Oddly, or perhaps tellingly, he tended to depict women more reverentially, though in his portrayals of couples the fragility and tender comedy inherent in couplehood settled equally on both partners. Mr. King's work is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, among other places, and he had dozens of solo gallery shows in New York and elsewhere. But the comic element of his work probably caused his reputation to suffer. Reviews of his exhibitions frequently began with the caveat that even though the work was funny, it was also serious, displaying superior technical skills, imaginative vision and the bolstering weight of a range of influences, from the ancient Etruscans to American folk art to 20th-century artists including Giacometti, Calder. and Elie Nadelman. The critic Hilton Kramer, one of Mr. King's most ardent advocates, wrote in a 1970 essay accompanying a New York gallery exhibit that he was, "among other things, an amusing artist, and nowadays this can, at times, be almost as much a liability as an asset." A "preoccupation with gesture is the focus of King's sculptural imagination," Mr. Kramer wrote. "Everything that one admires in his work - the virtuoso carving, the deft handling of a wide variety of materials, the shrewd observation and resourceful invention - all this is secondary to the concentration on gesture. The physical stance of the human animal as it negotiates the social arena, the unconscious gait that the body assumes in making its way in the social medium, the emotion traced by the course of a limb, a torso, a head, the features of a face, a coiffure or a costume - from a keen observation of these materials King has garnered a large stock of sculptural images notable for their wit, empathy, simplicity and psychological precision." William Dickey King...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Rhomboid, 2001 Laminated acrylic Signed and dated: Vasa / 2001 9.5" H x 4.5" W x 2.5" D (size is approximate) Vasa Velizar Mihich (born 1933), known as Vasa, is an American artist based in Los Angeles, California. Born in Yugoslavia, Vasa has lived in Los Angeles since his arrival in the United States in 1960. He is an academically trained painter and was a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles UCLA in the Department of Design and Media Arts. He taught theories of color to understand interdependence and interaction of color and form, color and quantity, color and placement, and after-image. In the 1960s, Vasa developed techniques for working with cast laminated acrylic forms based on simple Euclidean shapes. These prisms of luminous construction are created by composing colored planes within these geometric forms. To fully appreciate these works of art, it is essential to observe them from different angles―the sculptures dimensionality contributes to an ever-changing appearance. Now retired as a professor emeritus, Vasa focuses on his conceptual art practice. His studio, designed to accommodate the technology required for his work, is located in the heart of Los Angeles. He makes laminated acrylic sculptures that reflect and refract light. He has had solo exhibitions at galleries in the United States, Japan, Italy and Serbia, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Belgrade, the San Diego Museum of Art, and the Palm Springs Desert Museum. Vasa is best known for his sculptures made from colored pieces of the plastic, poly(methyl methacrylate), which is also known as acrylic and by the brand names Plexiglas and Lucite. Untitled from 1975, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art, demonstrates the effect of these minimalist sculptures. His work straddles the West Coast Light and Space art movement, Artists such as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, John McCracken, Larry Bell, Craig Kauffman, Billy Al Bengston, Peter Alexander, and Lita Albuquerque...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Daniela Cutait studied fine arts at FAAP in Sao Paulo in the early 1990s and has always been curious, creative, communicative and restless. The artist orbited through the universe of...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...

Copper burnished in fire, solid brass, piano wires, nylon, aluminum blasted with glass beads and stones—these are the elements used to create Alice Vander Vennen’s elegant new sculpt...

"Wall Strikes" by John Ruppert Cast bronze, Stainless Steel, Copper, Iron, from a fragment of a tree struck by lightning Edition of 3 Over the past 35 years, John Ruppert has been w...

Erin Vincent is a Toronto based-artist whose work draws on a variety of repetitive and labor intensive processes and materials. Things and common objects have always fascinated Vinc...