Pool and Upper Terrace at the Galerie House of Art and Design

Kasmin

Artwork by Saint Clair Cemin, Bernar Venet, and Raul Mourão.

Saint Clair Cemin
Berninesque, 2016
stainless steel
85 x 70 x 67 1/2 inches
215.9 x 177.8 x 171.4 cm

For more information, please contact Edith Dicconson, edith@kasmingallery.com.

Berninesque by Saint Clair Cemin belongs to a series that explores what the artist terms “scrambled symmetry.” In Cemin’s words: “a symmetric form was collapsed and reconfigured in a way that allows a certain order to be perceived by the viewer—in despite of the symmetry loss. The result is that we have a very different ‘look’ for each 45º of rotation, in any direction.” The name “Berninesque” comes as an homage to the slender forms of Bernini’s sculpture, for which the artist used beautiful young people as models, avoiding the muscular exaggerations of Michelangelo or Giambologna.

Bernar Venet
Indeterminate Line, 2013
rolled steel
72 7/8 x 89 3/8 x 51 1/8 inches
185 x 227 x 130 cm

For more information, please contact Edith Dicconson, edith@kasmingallery.com

Bernar Venet’s “Indeterminate Lines” series consists of spiraling rolls of steel that sit balanced or stacked in novel compositions. Venet’s physical manipulation of raw bars of steel into unscripted configurations demands gargantuan effort and reveals the relationship between artist and material as both a collaboration and a battle of will. The resulting configurations “open a doorway to fundamental principles such as indeterminacy, chance, accident, unpredictability, chaos and, even, incompleteness,” says the artist.

Raul Mourão
Rebel # 03, 2021
corten steel ed unique
290 x 170 x 125 cm | 114.2 x 66.9 x 49.2 in

Friedman Benda 

Settee by Wendell Castle. 

Wendell Castle [American, 1932-2018]
A New Seeing, 2015
Bronze
37 x 91.75 x 45.25 inches
94 x 233 x 115 cm
Edition of 8

This capacious three-seat settee revisits a typology that Castle made his own in the 1960s, invested with a new disjunctive energy. Like all of his late work, it is based on a small hand-carved model. After shaping a series of organic volumes, Castle cut through them at various angles and then rejoined them, achieving a strong contrast between gentle curvature and abruptly vectored smash-joints—a feature of his “Misfit” series, of which this is the only example in cast bronze, lending it a stately monumentality. A New Seeing also features an understructure comprised of individual ovoid forms, which visually seem to topple arbitrarily—like stones on a beach, perhaps—while providing exactly the right support.
-Wendell Castle: A New Vocabulary, Exh. Cat., New York: Friedman Benda, 2019