It has been a while since sculpture could be dismissed as “something you bump into when you back up to look at a painting,” as Ad Reinhardt, the Abstract Expressionist painter, once said. Even before Reinhardt died, in 1967, the medium was going supernova, expanding and diversifying at an astounding pace. First it began incorporating all manner of found objects and nontraditional materials; then it lifted brilliant color from painting and achieved new levels of abstraction. Since then it has come to include installations, environments, land art, performance and all manner of spectacle.
Right now sculpture is enjoying a high-profile moment, thanks to a head-spinning assortment of solo shows in Chelsea and elsewhere. Some present recent work by living artists spanning several generations; others showcase fascinating historical material of varying vintages. There are more shows than can comfortably be encompassed here, so what follows is a selective tour.
In Chelsea work by three major figures of postwar American art — John Chamberlain, 84; Jasper Johns, 81; and Donald Judd, who died in 1994 but would now be 82 — form something of a high-end trifecta. All played pivotal if very different roles in turning sculpture away from traditional figuration and toward new relationships with found objects, materials, process, color and the viewer’s space.
Mr. Chamberlain, having recently joined the Gagosian franchise, is making a stunning debut at that gallery’s West 24th Street big-top space. (There is also a relatively scattershot, seemingly sour-grapes exhibition of his work at his former representative, the Pace Gallery, in its West 22nd Street space, but never mind).
Among the largest works he has ever made, the Chamberlain sculptures at Gagosian all incorporate his signature crushed car bodies, fashioned with tremendous compositional variety and verve, and his usual unerring color sense. Variously comical, stately, architectural and gestural, these pieces erupt from the gallery’s expansive concrete floors like unusually well-shaped mesas, turning the totality into an exhilarating indoor landscape.
Mr. Johns’s show at Matthew Marks’s West 22nd Street gallery is as quiet as Mr. Chamberlain’s is boisterous. It centers on a series of reliefs that perfectly illustrate Mr. Johns’s best-known axiom: “Take an object. Do something to it. Do something else to it.” As stated in Mr. Johns’s revealing conversation with the painter Terry Winters in the show’s catalog, these works stem from a relieflike SculptMetal grid of the numbers zero through nine that Mr. Johns made somewhat hurriedly and a bit on the cheap as a commission for Lincoln Center in 1964.
Recently he made a sturdier, more precise version from scratch, which unexpectedly yielded a wax model of the piece, in addition to the radiant aluminum final cast on view at Marks. With typical economy, he did “something else” with the wax work, creating six smaller, exquisite two-sided relief fragments in bronze, aluminum and even silver that conflate painting, sculpture and printmaking in a new way.
It takes a while to enter into the obsessive concentration that suffuses these works, with their shifting textures, newsprint scraps and other small objects, all embalmed in cast metal. Their combination of lapidary detail and casual process reveals the intensity of Mr. Johns’s mind with unusual clarity.
