Curated by David Cohen
Essays by Eric Gelber

Curatorial Statement

CHRIS DUNCAN
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resumé 

GEOFFREY HEYWORTH
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KARLIS REKEVICS
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SALLY TITTMANN
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Visitor Information

About the Studio School

About the Gallery Program

Karlis Rekevics

Karlis Rekevics 219 2005
plaster, lights, dimensions variable
installation shot, Sculpture Center, Long Island City, 2005

Karlis Rekevics studied at the New York Studio School from the Fall of 1992 through the Spring of 1997. He says that drawing was emphasized throughout the Studio School and that he was one of the few sculpture students who drew all the time. Drawing has been an important part of Rekevics’ thinking and creative process throughout his life. In his larger drawings, he works in charcoal so that he can obliterate parts of the sketch and reconfigure the whole. For him, sculpture and drawing feed one another in a symbiotic relationship, which makes perfect sense for an artist who does not know what his sculpture will look like when he brings its plaster components to the gallery prior to the opening. The urban landscape Rekevics lives in is often the subject of his drawings. His sculptures contain identifiable elements of this manufactured anonymous terrain, but with his sculptures he completely alters the scale, eradicates details, and is more abstract. He is not interested in fine detail, but in the way areas of temporary cohesiveness form in the denatured urban environment.

Rekevics makes his plaster sculptures, which are sometimes combined with pieces of wood used for support, by building molds out of wood and other materials, pouring wet plaster into the molds and removing the forms once they set. He has created a process which allows for a complex interaction of control and accident. Since he deals with the practical and artistic issues of the very space the sculpture will be displayed in, his sculptures dramatically interact with the floor, ceiling, and walls. Verisimilitude plays its part as a poetic echo of the real in Rekevics’ sculpture. The references to specific shapes are reconfigured and altered in scale, and we are disoriented by and beckoned to the precarious whole; the white anti-architecture absorbs us into its otherworldly context.

A sculpture completed this year, “14' Circle”, which consists of two 7 foot plaster arcs cut up into equal 8 inch sections and intuitively arranged around the gallery, suggests that Rekevics can transform his studio and the gallery into a virtual drawing space. He uses drawing to play with ideas and formal arrangements, and in similar fashion he will play with the individual components of his sculptures in the actual exhibition space, where he finishes the sculpture. His sculptures are not impromptu arrangements; rather, the building process--coming up with solutions to such problems as how to prop up large unbalanced forms or how to connect them--is essential to his art. The walls of his studio are covered with layered charcoal drawings that map his thoughts about the linear design of city streets, rooftops, facades. The drawings deal with relationships between forms and the placement of lines, and so do his sculptures. The drawing process--adjusting scale, rearranging lines, strengthening relationships between parts--occurs at two stages of the sculpting process.

In the studio he makes his wood and cardboard molds and moves them about, deciding what will become the central focus of the sculpture. The introduction of new molds disrupts what was there before and leads to reconfigurations. At the end of the actively contemplative building phase, Rekevics makes his final decisions regarding what forms will be brought from the studio to the exhibition space and casts the plaster forms accordingly. In the gallery these will be arranged and rearranged in order to create subtle relationships. Sometimes he builds the molds in the exhibition space before doing any casting in order to avoid disaster later on. Although Rekevics is fully aware of the exact size of the space he will exhibit the work in, contingency plays a big part in all stages of his sculpting process. He describes the sense of mystery and surprise he experiences when he removes the plaster from the mold. In fact, most of the time he spends thinking about his sculpture he is actually working with the rough molds of shapes, and the way he makes his molds makes it impossible for him to know exactly what shapes they will produce.

Evidence of the sculptor’s handiwork does not manifest itself as expressionist affectation in Rekevics’ work. He doesn’t want to make objects with slick manufactured sheens but equally he is not interested in self-conscious messiness. Plaster is the perfect material to dramatize the pressure and friction generated by two objects resting on top of one another, and it also absorbs and reflects light in a sensuous way. The powdery plaster residue coats the surrounding space and reminds us that the sculpture was built recently and will abruptly cease to exist once the exhibition ends. 

Rekevics wants the building process, the hands-on manipulation of materials and the construction of forms to stand in for the solitary symbol. Ultimately, he wants the most pronounced human presence to be that of the viewer encountering the work. This is perhaps why he avoids organic forms. He views the cityscape as something ephemeral disguised as something more permanent. For Rekevics, completion of a sculpture means abandonment of it, because visual thinking, as it manifests itself in his drawings and sculptures, far from reflecting eternal values, is a way of constructing the here and now.

Eric Gelber