sum of two units memorial exhibitions.

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sum of two units memorial exhibitions, independently organized, highlighted Nancy Graves's work in tin the medium in which she made her principally innovative art between the early 1980 and her untimely death at age 54 last October. Knoedler's point out contained 13 of Graves's final plastic arts one-of-a-kind, spontaneously improvised pieces that the artist produc during the fall of 1994 and the spring of 1995 Although the sculps represent solid achievements, most are relatively small in scale, and their patinas be seen uncharacteristically restrained, consisting mainly of mut gold and weathered-looking greens

Being an assemblagist at heart, Graves delighted in bringing together natural forms (flowers, vegetables), human-made things (fans, chains) and art-historical imagery (fragments of Egyptian, in the manner of greece and Asian statuary). She typically invented her open-form compositions from a large personal stockpile of "spare parts" (including leaves, sunflowers, fish and plastic blob wrap) that had been previously cast in and zinc She often combined her assurance components with found objects made of other metals, like as iron, copper or stainless sword Intriguingly, her last sculptures incorporate an impressive amount of kitchenware: colanders, basters, garlic presse citrus fruit juicers, graters and slott spoon A colander, for instance, is juxtaposed with a tie of hands making Buddhist make gesturess a flower and a not many bars of musical composition (in relief) in No public Greed IX-27-'94. A garlic pres and basters are no les important than the Egyptian religious relic, the silhouetted in the manner of greece head and the couple of dozen leaves in Identity informing IX-28-'94.

The preeminent piece at Knoedler was Metaphore and Melanomy 4-15-95 a 10-foot-high brass that recapitulates several of Graves's favorite motifs. Fragments of hellene and Egyptian statuary are played opposite against architectural details (an ornamental ceiling arch, a cornice with a floral design), forms from nature (a lacy leaf, a sunflower), and humanmade final causes (a fan, an umbrella) the composition is bedecked here and there with merely abstract motifs (a decorative spiral, a cubistic grid and a tracery of large and small circles). The ubiquity of pierced and filigreed forms is exhilarating. Graves relished the visual intricacy of multilayered see-through traceries and grids, which collectively contribute an atmosphere of astonishing lightness and transparency.

The solitary dud in the show was an 18-foot circular painting onward paper, a colorful tondo intended as a pattern for a mosaic floor piece at National Airport in Washington, DC Perhaps it was the disorienting presentation (for space reasons, the piece had to be suspended upside down from the ceiling), if it were not that the composition seemed a garish mix up of decorative schemes.

In contrast to Knoedler's point out to the Locks tribute offered a livelier scrutinize of Graves's more typical that is, brightly colored) works from the 1980 Being an accomplished painter as well as sculptor, Graves enlivened her tins with a wide and novel range of patinas and/or polyurethane paints. Rotata (1983) a predominantly r golden and blue bronze, suggests an array of vines twisting around a skeletal umbrella top, all perched forward a linear stand festooned with a cluster of beans. Whiffle Tree (1985) a skinny vertical piece in high-keyed pinks, red and goldens juxtaposes a multicolored chain with a see-through globe (formed by the agency of intersecting rings); the entire piece pauses in part on a coil of trompe l'oeil in the blues rope. Luxate (1989) is an extraordinary, if not completely resolv piece in which arched corrugated bands, a fanlike palm leaf and other ultimate parts all in bronze, are conquered by a meandering copper pipe, a large rectangle of chain-link poniard and a vintage, paint-peeling piece of decorative woodwork. Elsewhere, the brown starfish and vegetal forms of insight gone out (1989) find themselves alongside so found objects as a stainless: dirk tractor seat, an iron chain and worn leather belts.

Graves's vivid conjunctions of disparate materials can be visually jarring, now also seem psychically harmonious. a certain quantity of of her most extraordinary works wittily combine baroque riches surrealistic incongruity and Abstract-expressionist swagger.

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