Arlene Shechet’s “Girl Group” comprises sixty-two pieces, six of which are large-scale outdoor works commissioned by the Storm King Art Center. The exhibition’s tongue-in-cheek title pokes fun at the more testosterone-soaked aspects of monumental sculpture. The artist’s decades-long practice, situated in a field of relationality, has always been concerned with the affective, the archival, and the eruptions of intimacy flowing between subject and object. The show pushes back against the “phallacious” self-seriousness of modernist sculpture with subtlety, elegance, and wit.
The outside works are loosely based upon a prior body of glazed ceramics by the artist, presented inside Storm King’s museum building, and respond to other sculptures from the institution’s permanent collection. For example, the fluid and tuliplike Dawn, 2024, consisting of matte-peach, gloss-lilac, and unpainted aluminum planes—some of which are reflective—takes formal cues from Shechet’s more condensed and compacted ceramic piece Together: 8 p.m., 2020. Dawn’s delicate palette also pays homage to the park’s Study in Arcs, 1957, by David Smith, although the inverted triangle shape of the former exudes a sense of fragility that is largely absent from the latter.
Elsewhere, Shechet’s Midnight, 2024, delights in the high drama of working in three dimensions. Its horizontal orientation absorbs the “base,” while its elliptical, back-and-forth motion confuses how one understands where the piece begins and where it ends. Like the other outdoor works, Midnight does not conceal its facture by hiding the welded areas. Viewers can observe these marks of authorship thanks to the sculpture’soutward, ground-level curves, punctured by apertures and painted with sunset tones reminiscent of a red stabile by Alexander Calder, also on view in the park.
Shechet’s citational, self-referential sculptural language reads as an emotive response to the less-acknowledged vulnerability of sculpture that is susceptible to so many external conditions, from weather to history.