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The nine new chic sculptures in Diana Puntar’s first solo show at Oliver Kamm suggest she could have had a successful career as a designer:  Meticulously conceived and crafted, attractive in scale, materials and color, her works evoke pieces of trendy furniture, but that’s about it.  As art objects, they’re little more than eye candy.
 
Not that Puntar doesn’t try to juice things up with a provocative show title.  Pretty, ringed patterns of plywood do make a few sculptures resemble snake tails, bringing Adam and Eve to mind. And a recurring pattern of Swiss cheese holes might suggest some dark undercurrent of infestation, but even that’s a stretch.  Overall, the soft, mint green hues and pleasingly curvy forms are more likely to evoke tree stumps or rock formations. 
 
According to the artist, the search for Bin Laden and Sadaam Hussein got her thinking about caves and hiding places.  But even with the lights switched off to reveal the sculptures’ glow-in-the dark paint, the installation fails to cohere to any environment.
 
This latest show has less of the sexy, hard edge glamour of Puntar’s previous work (including a recent installation at PS1) though it does continue to demonstrate her facility at creating seductive objects.  Maybe it’s okay that these sculptures exist purely as formal exercises, but the artist’s attempt to inject meaning into the mix with loose references to current events indicates that not even she believes this.
 
-Merrily Kerr