CANCELLEDTour of Corcoran's Exhibit of American Metal: The Art of Albert Paley - FREE
Please vist this exhibition on your own efore the Corcoran closes on September 28th.
From: The Washington Post
A new Corcoran Gallery retrospective of metal work by Albert Paley is a bittersweet pleasure. Plans for a Paley show date back to 2008, during the tenure of former director Paul Greenhalgh. Now they’ve come to fruition as the last major Corcoran exhibition before the gallery and school close as an independent entity, the art to be taken by the National Gallery, the school delivered into the insatiable maw of George Washington University, and tens of millions in cash (from the dubious sale of material from the collection) divided between the two institutions as a kind of macabre death dowry.
These are the last days of the Corcoran, and yet the old spirit is still vital. The Paley show has a deliciously local flavor — his work is richly represented in Washington — and it looks very fine in the light-filled, high-ceilinged galleries. But this show will be part of the institution’s epitaph, unless a D.C. Superior Court judge asks some serious questions — and defends the public’s interest — when the gallery requests permission to shred the intent of William Corcoran’s founding documents at a hearing on July 18.
Paley’s work deserves consideration independent of the sad circumstances of this show. One of the world’s most virtuosic forgers of metal, he does almost miraculous things with hard, intractable material. Inspired by Art Nouveau, and as keenly aware of the French Rococo style as the currents of contemporary art over the past half century, Paley’s metal gates, furniture and sculpture are sinuous and organic but have a strange sci-fi edge to them. A set of plant stands made in 1984 looks as if it was woven from vines, but on closer inspection it suggest a dystopian concatenation of tubing, flexible pipe and thick wires. Jewelry he made in the 1960s and ’70s is wonderfully crafted to hug the body, but it feels weirdly alien, as if designed for rituals on some planet more advanced yet more brutal than ours. Throughout the exhibition, one notices small details — a nub of metal, an errant spike — that have wandered in from the auto shop and nestled themselves into otherwise biomorphic forms.
One of Paley’s pivotal works is seen early in the exhibition, the 1974 Portal Gates he created for the Smithsonian’s Renwick Museum. Fabricated from steel, brass, copper and bronze, the Renwick gates marked a decisive turn from jewelry to larger, more sculptural forms. They are exquisite, earthy and beautiful balanced meditations on Art Nouveau, and they were made only two years after the opening of Mies van der Rohe’s Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial Library, a modernist box of glass and steel, less than 10 blocks away. The contrast, if anyone thought to make the comparison, must have been stunning: fluid metal, born of an ornamental impulse, flowing in loosely symmetrical patterns, vs. a grid of lines and girders, with little or no decoration to be found.
Click here to buy tickets!!!