Sculpture
Fox Jensen Gallery - 2014
T.J. McNamara: Masterly work recalls Rodin
Two galleries that share the same building offer a piquant and paradoxical contrast this week. Both are showing sculpture, one by a veteran working in abstraction; the other by a much younger artist doing figure sculpture.
The younger artist, Sam Harrison in the Fox/Jensen Gallery to the right of the door, has a traditional manner. His considerable reputation has been founded on modelling human figures, often life-size in plaster and, when possible, casting them in bronze. His style owes a good deal to the great French sculptor Rodin, in that his surfaces show evidence of the work of hands and attitudes of form that express emotional states.
The most Rodinesque work is Female Study, a torso balanced and tensioned as an arc between shoulders and back. The effect is of a woman in severe stress. An emotional charge is provided by the straining of the musculature, the prominence of the ribs and the fall of the breasts across the chest. The torso is a sculpture existing in its own right and completely expressive without head or arms.
Heads are not always absent. The compact piece Crouching Woman has her hands to her head in abject fear and misery. A similarly expressive work, Rolling Woman, needs a head to balance the work but here the face contributes to the joyous energy of the complex pose. The tall Twisting Woman has a turn of the head that reinforces the questioning nature of the figure. The show is not as large as Harrison's previous exhibition at this gallery, which was a whole group of highly individualised naked torsos, but it places more emphasis on the emotional expressiveness he has at his command.
His knowledge of the structure of the human body and his skill in foreshortening from thinking in three dimensions as a sculptor is shown in the decisive lines of the large, spare charcoal drawings that accompany the show. There is also an example of his large-scale woodcuts. Called Vincent Seated, it is notable for the energy of the complex depiction of hands and feet. It completes a small but masterly show.