Since the early 1980s, American artist Nancy Graves has been making open-form, colourful, playful sculptures in which she has joined various objects together to create large-scale spatial assemblages. She intuitively built a larger composition from elements cast in bronze using the direct method and found objects, and then coloured it using various methods (enamel, patina, paint). The familiar forms gave rise to a unique, witty sculpture that invites exploration and interpretation, as in the case of Smile, where we can identify a water tap, a scythe, rope and various plant parts and fruits in the elements welded together, among other things. Graves’ creative method, based on museum experiences, scientific interest, research and experimentation, was very different from the prevailing artistic concepts and trends of the time, while from the beginning of her career she attracted attention and achieved success with her ‘eccentric’, consistent art, which is still relevant today when it comes to collecting and processing data, and making scientific and artistic discoveries in order to understand the world.
Krisztina Szipőcs