Yesterday’s post featured Dieter Roth’s partially collapsed sculpture…in today’s, artist New York-based artist Sean Bluechel imagines ‘the moment before a collapse’ in cheeky sculptures cobbled together from forms derived from the history of ceramic art along with more contemporary vessels. (At Chelsea’s Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery through April 6th).
Sean Bluechel, installation view of ‘Still Life is No Life,’ at Nicole Klagsbrun Gallery, March 2013.
Andy Warhol is at the top of the contemporary art market, Rosemarie Trockel has a well-received solo exhibition at the New Museum. Neither’s accomplishments seem to phase Sean Bluechel, whose glazed ceramic bananas (reminiscent of Warhol’s famed fruit) appear to rain down on a Trockel knit wool painting from 1986 in ‘Banana Pissing Bananas on Trockel.’ (At Chelsea’s Nicole Klagsbrun, through January 19th.)
As far as quantity goes, the 36 ceramic sculptures and 25 photos crowding Nicole Klagsbrun’s side gallery suggest that Sean Bluechel is more than ready for his first major Chelsea show. In terms of quality, however, his creative profusion—and a goofy hedonism conveyed by ubiquitous smiley faces, multiple ceramic spliffs and an assortment of phallic objects ranging from digits to a corncob—threaten to distract from the show’s real gems: Remarkable shape-shifting objects conjure fantastical scenarios.
Though the ceramics are the main draw, Bluechel’s photos of totemic assemblages cobbled together from cardboard tubes, Styrofoam, tinsel, balloons and a very accommodating nude woman (who seems to have been shot in a basement) have a furtive quality, as well as a postdebauch air that is in keeping with the sculptures’ juxtaposition of lumpen forms and beautifully colored glazes. Yet they feel more like high jinks than high art.
Bluechel’s apparent references in a few of the sculptures to such artists as Jean Dubuffet and Yves Klein indicate that he’s mindful of the distinction. Yet his efforts work best when you overlook the visual hubbub of his busy installation and focus on select stand-alone pieces: the upside-down mushroom balanced on two blobs, titled Unshaved Wicca Girls; the quasi-camera/gun/musical instrument, rising from a dish amid a flurry of leaves, titledKill Vegans; the Kusama-channeling bouquet of protruding fingers crowned with a laurel. They all deliver their paeans to insouciant perversity with concision and humor.
Originally published in Time Out New York, issue 799, February 3-9, 2011.