Fusion II 2010 George Sherwood
Currier Museum of Art 2010 Recent sculpture acquisition for permanent collection
Currier Museum of Art
February 28th, 2011Katonah Museum
September 27th, 2010
George Sherwood: Wind Orchid On the South Lawn
October 3, 2010 – May 22, 2011
Wind Orchid, George Sherwood’s 24-foot-tall kinetic sculpture, gracefully responds to the changing environment outside the Museum. The wind choreographs the speed and rotation of the tendrils while stainless steel leaves reflect glimpses of sun and sky.
The Fells Historic estate and gardens on Lake Sunapee
September 6th, 2010456 Route 103A PO Box 276 Newbury, New Hampshire 03255 (Telephone) 603-763-4789 (Fax) 603-763-2452 (email) info@thefells.org |
July 1 through October 11
9am-5pm daily
Explore the artistic impressions of sculptors George Sherwood and Stephen Kishel displayed throughout the beautiful grounds of The Fells and in the Shop.
Sherwood’s sculpture incorporates space, time and the relationships between dynamic objects, the choreography of each piece governed by a set of basic movements with the wind providing an unpredictable element of improvisation. Wind speed and direction, shades of light, time of day, precipitation, and seasonal color interplay to transform the qualities of light and movement. See georgesherwood.com for more about Sherwood and his work.
Currier Museum of Art
June 13th, 2010
Spotlight New England
George Sherwood: In Delicate Balance
Organized by the Currier Museum of Art
May 29 – September 6, 2010
Rapid technological and industrial innovation defined much of the twentieth century, and early on, sculptors reacted with experiments in materials and forms, including moving parts. The sculpture of Massachusetts artist George Sherwood has its roots in this history, with delicate constructions of highly polished stainless steel and other metals engineered to gracefully and subtly respond to changing environmental conditions. With a recent installation on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway in Boston, Sherwood is an accomplished artist from the region, and honorably continues the Spotlight New England series, initiated in 2008.
While typically shown outdoors, Sherwood’s sculpture exhibited inside the Winter Garden and Putnam Gallery is an opportunity to focus on the work’s finely engineered mechanics. Alexander Calder’s mobile in the nearby contemporary gallery and Mark di Suvero’s kinetic sculpture Origins in Zachos Court—both part of the Currier’s Permanent Collection— form a conversation with Sherwood’s work and create a context and history for kinetic practices. In Delicate Balance includes an outdoor installation and is the Currier’s first temporary exhibition to feature work in the Winter Garden.
Watch the video about the installation of this exhibition.
This exhibition is supported by David and Barbara Roby and by the Fleisher Family Fund of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation.
Image Credits: George Sherwood, Steel Life I and II, 2009, Stainless steel.
Mosaics in Motion
February 24th, 2010
Minimalist by nature, collaborative by design
By Cate McQuaid Globe Correspondent / February 24, 2010
For August Ventimiglia, beauty is a byproduct. He’s a process artist. He sets up experiments, and his drawings, paintings, and sculpture at Judi Rotenberg Gallery are, in one sense, just traces of those experiments. That doesn’t mean Ventimiglia isn’t keenly aware of how they look – they’re gorgeous, velvety, simple, explosive. But unlike a painter with a brush considering every stroke, this artist steps back and invites chance to collaborate.
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Ventimiglia, whose work can also be seen now in the 2010 DeCordova Biennial, here pares his palette down to black and white, which imbues his work with a Zen-like rigor. “Crossing Over,’’ a 20-foot-long wall drawing, is the show-stopper, unfortunately obscured by two of the gallery’s architectural support columns. It’s a snap-line chalk drawing, made by holding a chalk-coated cord taut and snapping it against the wall. The resulting line is straight, and the chalk flies and drifts around it.
Here Ventimiglia made hundreds of lines, all crossing the 20-foot span in a dense, powdery black point at the center and fanning out on the sides. The drawing is precise but breathy, full of motion; the lines vibrate like strummed harp strings.
“Heat’’ is a simple oval drawn in charcoal on paper, over a period of 50 minutes. It lies flat, thick with built-up powder along the outside. Along the inside, the blackness of the drawing reveals the arduousness of the process. In sheer repetition, Ventimiglia captures something at once soft and hard, and almost alive. In what seems like tedium, we find revelation.
Daniel Alcalá’s drawings in the front room at Rotenberg make a great match for Ventimiglia’s work. Alcalá’s execution is equally ferocious. He covers paper in graphite so thick it gleams, then cuts wildly delicate silhouettes – construction landscapes threaded with cranes, as in the layered “City Constructors,’’ and slightly more pastoral landscapes that feature, according to gallery staff, cell towers disguised as trees, scruffy and strange in perfect verticality.
Mosaics in motion
Kinetic sculptor George Sherwood crafts undulating steel vines that twist elegantly in the wind, such as “Botanica,’’ his 35-foot tall sculpture on the Rose Fitzgerald Kennedy Greenway. He has smaller pieces like that in his show at Boston Sculptors Gallery, finely wrought and suited to public parks, with their nature motifs and tame beauty.
But they don’t have the playfulness and inventive wit of his two 8-foot-tall “Steel Life’’ sculptures. Each is a face, comprising scores of stainless steel polygons, which float on hooks attached to a gridded backing. They look like mosaics. Then a breeze comes through – in the gallery, provided by a fan – and the little steel shards waffle in the wind, rippling light over the large faces like a fast-moving sun. These are no less suited to parks, and they’re conceptually sharper and more engaging than the twisting vines.
Boston Greenway Botanica
September 6th, 2009
Botanica, a kinetic sculpture by acclaimed artist George Sherwood, was installed on The Rose F. Kennedy Greenway, Atlantic Avenue across from Rowes Wharf, in July 2009. This temporary art exhibit will run from July 23, 2009 to December 2010, with the provision that it may be removed during the winter months.
“Botanica” was originally chosen by a juried panel in a collaborative project between the Conservancy and the UrbanArts Institute of the Massachusetts College of Art and Design to install a few temporary exhibits of sculpture in advance of the October 2008 Greenway Inaugural Celebration. However, lack of funding and complexity of installation prevented installation of this work at that time. This spring the Conservancy received the support of a generous private donor. Read the rest of this entry »
Wind and Light Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens
November 8th, 2008
Throughout the summer of 2008, George Sherwood’s kinetic sculpture delighted visitors at Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens. Nine stainless steel pieces, ranging in scale from a table-top interior WIND ORCHID to the thirty foot tall TENDRILS, animated the landscape. Abstracted HERONS danced in the pond among lilies, with their reflections mirrored in the water’s surface. FLOCK OF BIRDS soared over the Event Lawns as individual helixes rotated in light, yet moved together as one. In the Entry Gardens, FUSION contained the synergistic power to transform with the brush of a butterfly wing, and on the Great Lawn, TENDRILS traced the wind’s path with lingering form while flashing in moments of light.
Wind driven and meticulously crafted to catch the light, George Sherwood’s sculpture resonates deeply, striking a chord that connects viewers to their primal relationship with the natural world. While other kinetic artists use more geometric forms that reflect a mechanistic worldview, George Sherwood celebrates botanical forms and patterns in nature with proportional harmony. Sherwood creates sculpture intricate in its complexity yet pared down to elegant essential form. His work contains great volume without mass. The result quickens our heart and nurtures our soul with each breath of wind and flash of sunlight. Read the rest of this entry »
Woodstock Magazine: “George Sherwood: A Sculptor for All Seasons”
August 17th, 2008
Sherwood sculpture featured in Woodstock Magazine
By Meg Brazill
(for .pdf article with images click here)
George Sherwood is a kinetic sculptor. His sculptures move, depending on wind and air currents. In just a word or two, the titles of his work describe the works themselves: Tendrils, towering at thirty feet, Wind Orchid, Square Wave, Arc Angel. Some of his sculptures, such as Heron(s) or Tea of Turns, are figurative, depicting not just birds but their natural movements.
Visitors to Woodstock’s 2005 Sculpture Fest remember Sherwood’s Standing Wave sculpture, sited prominently at the crest of a field. Its wind-driven choreography intrigued audiences and, during Sculpture Fest’s opening weekend, it also served as a partner to Flock Dance Troupe, whose dancers performed in front of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Moving Sculpture George Sherwood ’84
August 19th, 2005By Thomas Weaver
Vermont Quarterly Magazine Winter issue,
Burlington, Vermont
For a sculpture truly completed by a gust of wind stirring it into motion, there are few better places to be than the Shelburne Farms lakeshore. On a late-September morning, a steady breeze off Lake Champlain sets George Sherwood’s “Botanica” rotating in slow, graceful arcs that bring to mind, say, the rhythmic arm strokes of a swimmer, a Renaissance courtship dance, or plants waving in the wind. Read the rest of this entry »
Salem Evening News George Sherwood profile December 2005
August 19th, 2005
By Steve Landwehr
Staff writer
IPSWICH — Mention sculpture, and most people probably conjure up images of Michelangelo’s “Pieta” or Rodin’s “The Thinker.” Formed of marble or bronze, their beauty is timeless and unchanging.
Ipswich artist George Sherwood crafts pieces that are intentionally more fluid, always changing and only truly come to life when they ride the wind.
Sherwood, 51, is a kinetic sculptor who fashions stainless steel tubes and plates into deceptively simple, moving art forms meant to be displayed outdoors. Eight years ago, he gave up a job designing toys for Lego in Boston for work in a studio a stone’s throw from his Argilla Road home.
“I basically changed a 31/2-hour commute to a 31/2-second one,” Sherwood says. Read the rest of this entry »