The Sculpture of Nancy Graves: A Catalogue Raisonne with Essays

Graves's highly personal sculpture is poetic, whimsical, sometimes perversely funny and nearly always wildly colorful. She pulls together natural and inanimate objects, coloring them with patination, fired enamel and polyurethane paint. Then her imagination combines and recombines these forms into improbable meditations on nature. A representative piece, Extend-Expand, is made of carob beans, vines, kitchen scissors, dried twigs and a chain of sardines, all transformed into a work of rigorous formalism. In another piece, 38 steel rods, abuzz with wax and acrylic outgrowths, form a rhythmic fugue on the theme of biological evolution. Graves eclectically exploits many traditions, sources, elements: Egyptian artifacts, Native American spiritualism, constructivist sculpture (Miro, Picasso, Smith), paleontology, masks, totems. This album catalogues a traveling exhibition. (May 26)