OLIVER ANDREWS (b. 1925 - d. 1978)
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For the last fifteen years of Oliver Andrews’ life, water was the common element of his work. There was water flowing over his sculptures, and had done sculptures in the ocean with Mylar and helium balloons. Andrews was making underwater films, viewing water as a universal medium that allowed a non-verbal communication between all forms of life. He felt it was through water that many people receive contemplative feelings — that gardens are meant to be places of calm and quiet, set aside from everyday life, where one could reconnect with nature. Water was the element of Andrews’ astrological sign, and he died while scuba diving with friends off Anacapa Island in Santa Barbara. Andrews had been a UCLA art professor for 20 years and at the time of his death was head of the sculpture department. He had worked on commissions for public places and private collectors. The University of California Press published a book by Andrews entitled Living Materials: A Sculptor’s Handbook. His WATER BLADE sculpture is a fine example of his minimalist stainless steel and titanium sculpture. Andrews’ works can be seen at El Paseo de Saratoga in San Jose, Odessa, Texas, and at Storm King Art Center in Mountainville, New York.
MIKE BACON (b. 1949)
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Shapes, shadows, and color have always been joyous for Los Angeles artist Mike Bacon. A collector for several decades, Bacon became deeply affected by the works he collected, both in a subtle and powerful manner, and became an artist himself, creating unique metal, one-of-a-kind works. Most of his sculpture is created from cold rolled steel and found objects, which are then recombined in a stream-of-consciousness manner to make shapes and structures he finds pleasing or slightly unsettling. He loves both balance and imbalance. His patinas are either raw, hand painted, plated, or powder-coated. Bacon has shown his work in recent exhibitions in New York, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Culver City, and Sun Valley, Idaho.
ED BENAVENTE (b. 1960)
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Whimsical yet often with a footnote of serious contemplation, the work of Ed Benavente largely focuses on the illustrative portrayal of the human condition. Typically these depictions feature elongated stick man figures and other characters that fall somewhere between the likes of Alberto Giacometti and Walt Disney. The artist’s early ambitions of becoming a cartoonist show through not only in the imagery but also with the inclusion of titles for the works that often invoke truisms, philosophical references and contemporary catch phrases. Each work of art is meant to illustrate or tell a story. The idea is to reduce the elements of the image in such a way that the viewer is compelled to add to the story, details from his/her own experience. By doing this, one recognizes the commonality of thoughts and emotions shared by others but perhaps not always spoken. Born and raised in Los Angeles, the artist currently resides in Beacon, New York. Benavente has been exhibiting with Carl Schlosberg Fine Arts for 20 years and has shown his work at Imago Gallery in Palm Desert as well as in New York. Corporate and public installations include Big Red at the Malibu Country Mart, Pyramid Hill Sculpture Park in Hamilton, OH, and Wandell Sculpture Garden at Meadow Park, Urbana, IL.
KEN BORTOLAZZO (b. 1947)
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Ken Bortolazzo’s early passion for complex puzzles is evident in his intricate interlocking geometric forms. These structured sculptures subtly suggest their beginnings in the natural order of things: the rhythm and sequence of breaking waves, rock formations and plant growth. His large works play with light and scale, and reference the post-industrial landscape. His later kinetic works feature dynamic optical effects. Constructed out of burnished, perforated, stainless steel, they move and create a physical phenomenon known as optical interference patterns, a moiré effect. Bortolazzo’s sense of craftsmanship defies the challenge of the material used, and each work finds a delicate balance between solidity and lightness. Bortolazzo creates small, intimate works as well as large monumental sculpture. At his Santa Barbara studio, he grinds stainless steel, creating a surface that beautifully reflects light. In his work, there is a dichotomy between the simplicity of the line and the complexity of the lines’ interaction. Bortolazzo’s forms are not intrusive. They fit into the environment, extending it through a silent dialogue that complements the surroundings. Refined and strong, his sculpture invites the eye to explore all sorts of optical possibilities. His works can be found in museums and public collections including the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, Museum of Outdoor Art in Denver, Microsoft Corporate Headquarters in Seattle, and PTI Technologies in Oxnard.
DEBORAH BUTTERFIELD (b. 1949)
Known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, scrap metal, wood, and cast bronze, Deborah Butterfield divides her time between a ranch in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. The artist says, “for the pieces I make, the gesture is really more within the body. It’s like an internalized gesture, which is more about the content, the state of mind or of being at a given instant." The horses are slightly larger than life size and are cast in bronze from pieces of wood of various shapes and sizes. Butterfield has sculpted them piece by piece by assembling logs, branches, sticks, planks and boards onto an armature, which gives the basic posture of the particular horse. The entire piece is patinated with chemicals to approximate the colors of the original weathered wood or plant matter. Butterfield’s works can be seen in museums throughout the United States, including the Metropolitan Museum and Brooklyn Museum, New York, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C., Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Art Institute of Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, MOCA and the UCLA Franklin D. Murphy Sculpture Garden, Los Angeles.
WOODS DAVY (b. 1949)
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Since the early 1980s, Woods Davy has worked with natural form, predominately large stone elements of rounded organic shape—first, in combination with man-made steel structures, and then on their own, stacked or floating in space, usually incorporating various types of stone in fluid balancing acts that reflect the artist’s “Western Zen” sensibility. He incorporates steel, tree trunks and naturally rounded stones in an array of colors, including pink, grey, blue, green and beige, which he gathers at low tide on beaches in Mexico, breathing into his sculptures an incredible power. Davy finds the process of building sculptures to be instinctive and exciting, without preconceived notions of arrangement or structure. The artist maintains a calm and focused energy when working, and in fact, these notions characterize each piece. Stones are carefully chosen and suspended, seeming to defy laws of gravity and float like clouds — an acute play on weightlessness. Davy has had solo exhibitions in Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Palm Desert, La Jolla, New York, Santa Fe, Scottsdale and Phoenix, and Ketchum, Idaho. In 2010, Davy had his first European exhibition in Paris. A large number of American collectors and public collections have his work, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Palm Springs Desert Museum, IBM, Xerox, and Neutrogena.
BRAD HOWE (b. 1959)
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As a student of International Relations at Stanford University, Brad Howe attended the University of Sao Paulo to specialize in Brazilian Affairs, which led to his discovery of art and architecture. Howe’s career has been international from the beginning, in the aesthetic influences that shaped his artistic language as well as in the wide-ranging places and art communities he has sought to engage with his sculptures. The artist says his work examines vitality and celebrates beauty. Their structures are composed with actual or implied kinetic properties aimed at exposing energized moments between: forces of attraction and repulsion, gravity and weightlessness, balance and imbalance, linear and curvilinear, connection and disconnection, and strain and serenity. His most recent works include a continuing series of monumental sculpture commissions for the City of Los Angeles, M.I.T. in Cambridge, the Georgia International Convention Center and an 18-foot stainless steel work for a corporation in Biberach, Germany. Howe has had solo exhibitions in California, including Los Angeles, Montecito, San Francisco, Santa Monica, Laguna Beach; in other American cities including, Miami, Chicago, San Antonio; in Europe, including Munich, Stuttgart, Biberach, Ulm, Zurich, Paris; and in Mexico City and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
JEFFERY LAUDENSLAGER (b. 1946)
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Active, lively, dynamic, and energizing describe both Jeffery Laudenslager and his sculpture. Much of his stainless steel and or titanium work is kinetic, but even the static pieces are illusionist riddles of steel that trick the mind with clever geometries. Throughout his career, Laudenslager has sought the most economical means at his disposal to convey his ideas. This reductive effort has resulted in an understated elegance and grace. His largest piece to date is the 34-ft Archimage (master magician), which received one of San Diego’s coveted Orchid Awards highlighting the best in architecture, design and fine art. The piece is located at the Torrey Reserve complex in La Jolla. Nearby, several of Laudenslager’s works adorn the Wolfstein Sculpture Park on the grounds of Scripps Memorial Hospital. While Laudenslager enjoys going into his studio to create works less than 12 feet tall, most of his creative time is spent on the computer using an engineering program with real-time animation to design monumental sculptures and see how all the parts work together in three dimensions. The program creates a blueprint for cutting out the various pieces. The final steps of finishing the surface and perfectly balancing the multiple sections are where Laudenslager really gets physically involved. His works grace other public collections, including the Weisman Museum at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Laguna Beach Art Museum, The Woodlands in Texas, Saddleback College and UC Irvine Medical Center in Orange, Grossmont College in San Diego, St. Mary’s Hospital in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and Vela Luka, Croatia.
MARLENE LOUCHHEIM (b. 1932)
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Working between two studios, one in her native Los Angeles and one at her home in Hawaii, Marlene Louchheim finds that her most creative hours are often in the early morning. Perhaps in the early dawn she does most of her imagining, seeing forms in her head, and they evolve much like a dream might take shape in the subconscious. Throughout her life, Louccheim has been a keen observer of human relationships, and she creates her sculptures to explore the subtleties and intricacies of human emotion. Louchheim uses burlap, bronze, aluminum, and copper to create an emotional stage for the natural twists and sensual curves in her material. Her "bags" talk to each other— about love, about distance, about fear and tenderness. Each has its own message and uniqueness, like the differences that exist in the humans who view them. Sculptural movement can be felt in her magnificent polished bronze wall reliefs. She has also done sculptures in stone—chiseling, rasping, sanding and polishing. Louchheim’s sculptures range in size from small, intimate indoor pieces to giant aluminum and bronze works and water sculpture. In Palm Desert in 2005, Louchheim had a 25-year retrospective at the Walter Marks Museum on the campus of the College of the Desert. In the past several years, she has had commissions on the Big Island in Hawaii, including the water sculptures, Hawaiian Lava Flow and one of her more prominent installations, Hawaiian Waterfall, a six-foot burlap and bronze work for another home on the island.
GWYNN MURRILL (b. 1942)
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Gwynn Murrill sees her works as a tribute to the mystery and nobility of wild animals that are threatened by the lack of human understanding. Murrill, who lives in the Santa Monica mountains, tries to stay away from portraiture, paying more attention to the abstract qualities of the animal’s form. Her work has a cool, smooth, simplified spirit; her figures are both timeless and contemporary. She relies on photographs and memories of the rare glimpses she’s had of her wild subjects. Her earliest animals—life-size coyotes, cougars, and other cats—were carved out of large blocks of laminated wood. More recently she has tested media such as marble and bronze. Her work can be seen in a number of public commissions and across the globe. The city of Obihiro, Japan first installed her Seven Deer along its main thoroughfare in 2003, and Los Angeles’s Grand Hope Park is home to a collection of three coyotes, a hawk and a snake. Over her career, Murrill has received many accolades: a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Prix di Roma Fellowship, a National Endowment Grant, and a purchase award from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Her sculptures are in the latter’s public collection as well as other public places, including the City of Santa Monica, Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, Portland Museum of Art, Palm Springs Desert Museum, Salt River Project, Phoenix, and Trammel Crow Corp, Minneapolis.
TOM OTTERNESS (b. 1952)
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For over three decades, Tom Otterness has played a major role in redefining the age-old tradition of cast bronze figurative sculpture. Out of his New York studio has come sensational group works that are in parks, plazas, subway stations, courthouses, libraries, and museums. Using stylized figures that often resemble whimsical cartoon characters, he draws inspiration from popular culture, exploring a wide range of human experiences from the world of social commentary. He has tackled themes of money, religion, sex, and class, carrying controversial subjects into the public domain. In 1987, Otterness gained a big audience for his exhibited work The Tables in the New York MOMA sculpture garden.. On four bronze picnic tables, white-collar workers, blue-collar workers, cops, radicals, and captains of industry were displayed. In 2005, Tom Otterness on Broadway, his largest exhibition to date, featured 25 different works installed between Columbus Circle and 168th Street. His works can be found in widespread public collections in the United States as well as The Netherlands, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Japan, Mexico, and Jerusalem, including the Eli Broad Family Foundation, Brooklyn Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Guggenheim Museum, and Whitney Museum, the Miyagi Museum of Art, Japan, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City, San Francisco Museum of Art, Dallas Museum of Art.
BRET PRICE (b. 1950)
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For a decade, Bret Price was an assistant professor of art at Chapman University in Orange, California. Since 1979, Price has been building heating chambers around large pieces of steel, applying concentrated, intense heat, then manipulating the material to create a sense of softness. Price’s intent is that these sculptures communicate a sense of continuance, as if each piece is a single frame taken from a film, appearing to be at rest before moving on. Price gets a wide variety of results—from the quiet simplicity of a single pipe bend to the rhythmic complexity that emerges from folding a large section of structural steel. A degree of unpredictability is always present, which tends to tease one’s curiosity and lend energy. In 2003, at a high school on Long Island, NY, Price installed Recollection: A Tribute to Tom Collins and Chris Panatier, two friends who perished in the Twin Towers on 9/11/2001. In 2006-2007, Price’s solo exhibition Bret Price: Around the Bend exhibited his monumental steel works at the Dayton Art Institute, in Ohio. In 2008, Price had a solo show, “Explorations in Metal,” at Colorado State University in Fort Collins. Price’s works are in many public collections, including the Pepsico Sculpture Garden in Purchase, New York, Orange County Museum of Art, Laguna Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach Museum of Art, City of Newport Beach, Pomona College in Claremont, San Antonio Museum of Art, and University of Evansville in Indiana.
GEORGE RICKEY (b. 1907 – d. 2002)
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In 1964, when George Rickey showed his large outdoor two-bladed kinetic sculpture at Documenta III in Kassel, Germany, he established himself internationally as a major 20th-century figure in the history of kinetic sculpture. His gently moving stainless steel sculptures are known to millions in Europe, North America, and Japan. Rickey extended his repertoire from the blade pieces to other kinds of movements and different geometric shapes, particularly squares, rectangles, triangles, and circles. His Double L’s suggest change and vitality, performing like a choreographed duet, looking as if they might collide, but never do. Many of Rickey’s sculptures feature slow, graceful, sweeping cadences. Some combine several types of motion, ranging from pendulums to angular joined rotations and swooping eccentric and gyratory modes. He orchestrated individual components to move in different directions as well as in different tempos. His work required many hours of tedious labor and much patience, as each sculpture’s grace and hypnotic allure belied the effort that went into its execution.. The pivot, pendulum, and gimbal all came into play in Rickey’s series of indoor “rotor” sculptures. Carl Schlosberg Fine Arts held major exhibitions that Rickey attended on the milestones of his 75th, 80th, 85th, and 90th birthdays.
EDOARDO VILLA (b. 1915)
One of South Africa’s foremost sculptors, Edoardo Villa was born in Italy and studied sculpture in Milan. After his release as a prisoner of war during World War II, he remained in South Africa to pursue his career as a sculptor. On five occasions, Villa was chosen to represent South Africa at the Venice Biennale. The 70’s and 80’s were a period of intensifying pain and anger in apartheid-plagued South Africa. A crisis point was reached in 1976, the year of the Soweto Riots. A sense of looming disaster pervades Villa’s output of the period, and in 1978 he created Confrontation, a group of eight protagonists, severe in form, but as resonant in meaning as Rodin’s Burghers of Calais. In 1983, Villa introduced Mother and Child, quiet, dignified, elegant and tender. A simple column, its tallness gives it a spiritual presence that lifts it above the mundane. Villa’s brilliantly red The Knot on the Cape Town Foreshore is a distinct landmark and presence in that city. In 1995, in celebration of the artist’s 80th birthday, the Edoardo Villa Museum was officially opened at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. In 2004, Villa Museum, housing more than 100 works, was established in Treviglio, Italy. Aside from working masterfully in steel, Villa has created large bronze works that would seem to be abstract, yet are basically figurative in concept. The universality of humankind is a theme that dominates his sculpture.
LEW WATANABE (b. 1933)
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The working of stone links Lew Watanabe to an old tradition. He has created water sculpture and weeping water walls, as well as monoliths and benches. In this age of stress, he has created settings for meditation and reflection, serenity and peace. Watanabe has public works in the city of Sierra Madre, where he has lived and worked for decades, as well as in Descanso Gardens in La Canada-Flintridge and in the garden of the Frederick Weisman Museum on the Pepperdine campus in Malibu. Always quiet and humble, Watanabe was put in the spotlight with his unrelenting perseverance, courage and optimism in recovering from a freak accident he suffered in 2003 while installing art. From a prognosis of quadriplegic, Watanabe surpassed every medical expectation and has recovered to a remarkable extent. With the help of 200 friends in the art community, who provided the funds for daily physical therapy, acupuncture with electrical stimulation and deep tissue massage, Watanabe has regained enough range of motion and fine muscle to work on landscape projects.
