Margaret Ewing on Esther Kläs
Sublimely spare, the six sculptures and three drawings in Esther Kläs’s exhibition right here remodeled the gallery right into a zone of tranquility, imbued with a simplicity and quietude that had been a soothing balm for the relentless onslaught of knowledge and expertise that defines life in New York Metropolis. The ethereal, sensitively balanced configuration of components highlighted the artist’s obsessions with area and floor whereas making evident her clear enjoyment of supplies. The set up of the objects—created from numerous metals, wooden, concrete, and paper—appeared site-specific, the standard giving the presentation a refined however plain repleteness.
Since garnering reward for her exhibitions of totemic sculptures at this gallery in 2011—and at New York’s MoMA PS1 the next yr—Kläs has moved steadily within the route of an excellent marriage between materiality and kind together with her work, which deftly combines laborious with mushy, heavy with gentle. Three of the sculptures included components that regarded like wiry bronze image frames, which originated as drawings on the ground and had been laid flat on the bottom. The freehand line and funky steel made for a placing mixture. One of many frames was included in Random Magnificence, 2021, and was set on the foot of a diminutive, knee-high, tentlike construction constructed from swaths of white-cotton material stretched and glued between six bamboo rods. Close by, Beginnings, 2021, juxtaposed a double stack of roughly forged concrete blocks elevated by wood dowels with one more body, the floor of which alternated between excessive polish and a chocolaty patina.
Elsewhere within the present, the whimsical SEE YOU, 2021, was crafted from two shoe-high lengths of cardboard, loosely secured in a circle and a semicircle, respectively, by items of white string. With interiors painted an brisk red-orange, they felt featherlight and fleeting. Throughout the gallery, About, 2019–21, comprising a pair of bigger components, added a little bit of monumentality to the present. One half was produced from a U-shaped piece of closely textured aluminum and suspended from the ceiling by a wire; it floated above a skinny slab of concrete formed like a bodyboard. Coloured by washes of blue dye, the economic supplies appeared virtually fragile. Camino, 2021, is an roughly six-foot-tall (and notably skinny) slab of bronze. Resting flippantly in opposition to the wall, it foregrounded course of—the work’s rough-hewn floor is seductively adumbrated by a shadowy black veneer.
The present was bookended by two large-scale drawings, each from 2021, unframed and easily hung with pins. The fabric high quality of the paper was as perceptible as that of the thickly utilized oil stick and pastels—in wealthy tones of forest inexperienced, ruddy brown, and royal blue—used to mark it, making the works learn extra as three-dimensional objects than as two-dimensional ones. A easy vocabulary of spheres and features revealed the artist’s need to strike a steadiness between kind and area looking for equilibrium.
The strikes Kläs didn’t make on this exhibition had been simply as essential as those who she did make. The artist is guided by a cautious restraint, introducing solely sufficient of her hand to permit the supplies’ personal properties to shine by. This strategy—steeped in play, experimentation, curiosity, and thoughtfulness—is as delicate as it’s forceful, delivering all the things cleverly disguised as virtually nothing.
— Margaret Ewing
