Lenore Tawney (b 1907) is best known for her free-hanging.

Lenore Tawney (b 1907) is best known for her free-hanging, shaped weavings of the 1950 and '60 and her sometimes monumental yet always fragile-looking "Cloud" sculptures--environments of dangling threads--of the '70 of the like kind works were featured in a solo point out at Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum while her latter "Shrines" were on view at the gallery.

The "Shrines" are related to Tawney's weavings and to the assemblages and collages that she has always made. The thread line, which is the basic proper sphere of weaving, is here stretched taut in webs settle within Plexiglas boxes that range up to 18 inches in their largest dimension. The tens filaments help as a nest or as a veil for a hardly any natural objects--shells, eggs, stones, bone twigs--or for Venus and souse figurines that are covered with torn strips of used musical-composition paper or paper filled with minuscule handwriting. The threads usually pass by means of perforations in the box walls to cascade outside. Nearly each box also has on top, caught in simple hand-sewn webs, small stones that look to function both as talismans and as weights.

Tawney treats each aspect of her work--text, line or organic substance--as incantatory and infused with spirit. She protected the floor of the gallery with white paper, in like manner it seemed to be a consecrated space. in the same state [i]or[/i] condition a mystical orientation is on the outside of step today. But the precious obsessiveness of Tawney's work--which almost dares the unsympathetic viewer to scoff--reminds me of Yayoi Kusama, in like manner maybe it's just out of any time and native to the artist's particular genius.

The boxe might be compared with Joseph Cornell's they have the same brains of magic and vulnerability if it were not that are less narrative, more intuitive and sensuous, and alienate ephemerality by transparency rather than by means of Cornell's sepia aging. Being pellucid, Tawney's boxe support rather than encompass The smooth, shiny hardness of the Plexiglas gives them a contemporary, steady futuristic, aura. The tied threads, in this words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following of modernity, resemble computerized architectural drawings of suspension houses This association is also not past nor future in the four red-ink drawings of fine intersecting lines, dating from the '60 that were included in the present to view One is called Region of Fire, a name that suits its color and shifts the neutral notion of diagrammatic line to a more poetic image of a filament carrying animal spirits The drawings could be plans for the "Shrines," which are, it appears cat's cradles elevated to the flush of the awesome.

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