When painting flirts with sculpture

Carole Rabe, Summer Day Kitchen, 2020

Three dimensions are playfully obvious in Carole Rabe’s collages in “Chasing Color” now at Concord Art Center. Rabe, a painter of interiorscapes in changing daylight, has said that after painting she uses up extra color by cleaning her brushes on scrap paper. The artist arranges the scrap papers to create new compositions, a sometimes-laborious process that Rabe says can take longer to complete than an oil painting. Summer Day Kitchen employs an intense palette–a bright, filtered light transfigures everyday objects. Skillfully arranged color, texture, and cutout shapes form a teasing puzzle of visibly three-dimensional surfaces.

Chasing Color is up until March 22 in Concord, Massachusetts.

Doris Salcedo, Untitled

Stainless Steel 2004-2005 Fogg Museum, Harvard University

A painful and incomprehensible emptiness, the aftermath of some unknown, violent occurrence, is suggested by Doris Salcedo’s Untitled chair. Salcedo often employs chairs, in large aggregations or singly, suggesting a human presence–even an entire community–that has been damaged beyond repair.

Says Salcedo: “Sculpture is its materiality. I work with materials that are already charged with significance, with meaning they have required in the practice of everyday life…then, I work to the point where it becomes something else, where metamorphosis is reached.”^[6]

The Untitled chair is roughly contemporaneous with Istanbul, an installation of 1500 chairs piled between two buildings. Salcedo means Istanbul to represent mass graves of anonymous victims, and it is redolent of the Holocaust as well as more recent horrors of wartime violence and chaos. Salcedo lives and works in her home city of Bogota, Colombia; it is a rare moment of grace to see her sculpture here in New England.

Visit “Untitled” at the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Mass.

Istanbul pictures, description: https://mymodernmet.com/doris-salcedo-1550-chairs-stacked/