The New Gallery - Thom Andriola - Houston, Texas Contemporary Fine Art

	Edward Lee Hendricks Polychromatics 1973-2005 Exhibition at New Gallery Opening Saturday, January 7, 2006 Artist’s Reception January 7, 6:00-8:00 pm In 1973 Edward Lee Hendricks was making paintings in the geometric tradition, taking 48 x 24 x 4 inch masonite and wood panels and sectioning this well proportioned rectangle into various configurations. In one work a blue H form hovers against a gray ground, contrasting with orange areas that fill in the negative space of the H. In other works made from masonite, Hendricks presents spiraling interlocking forms in various colors, offering the eye a rotating counter-balanced geometry. Whirling Mandela-like, these wall-mounted volumes were all executed with a flawless precision and have a uniformly smooth surface attainable only through countless sprayed layers of automotive finish. In Untitled (1973), the twenty year-old Hendricks applied his painting acumen to two curved forms, bright orange and bending away from each other, set atop a rusted steel pipe reaching twelve feet into the air. This work may be understood to be the embryonic statement of the artist declaring his fascination with visual dynamism and lyrical geometry. As Hendricks developed his interests in form, animating curvaceous shapes on a rotating mount, so too did his ability as a colorist unfold. Gold becomes a primary element, a constant against which other materials and often bold colors are set. In a series of immaculately crafted circular works from the early 1990s, Hendricks again ponders the difference between painting and sculpture by mounting these optically vibrant objects to the wall. The eye scans the perimeter of the forms, notching off the regularly spaced elements rhythmically, assessing the apparent perfection of the fabrication. Unlike an artist such as Donald Judd who valorized a method of making work that did not involve his own hand, Hendricks is himself intimately involved in the making of his objects, immersing himself within the labor of perfection. In his most recent work, Hendricks returns to some of his earliest themes and preoccupations. Acurved aluminum sculpture finished in black urethane enamel is set upon a granite pedestal in Untitled (2003). It directly recalls the soaring steel sculpture from 1973, yet now there is a confidence in the relationship between materials that is consummate, a more measured assessment of proportion. This retrospection can also be seen in the zigzagging wall-mounted forms that directly recall Hendricks’s 1973 play on Constantine Brancusi’s iconic Endless Column. In a sense, much of Hendricks’s aesthetic derives from such baselines of twentieth century sculpture. Perhaps Hendricks does not title his work so as to allow viewers to apply their own referential readings, whether those tend in the direction of forebears such as Isamu Noguchi, Minimalists such as Judd and Craig Kauffman, or older contemporary sculptors such as Martin Puryear. Whatever the range of reference that might be conjured by Hendricks’s work, however, there remains an interior evolution that is striking and consistent, charting a course through the end of modernist sculpture that addresses the primary issue of color. Indeed, Hendricks understood early an insight that the critic Michael Fried articulated about Anthony Caro’s revolutionary use of color in sculpture, noting: “Applied color cannot displace surface; it is itself surface.” Such a characterization gives rise to the primacy of color as constituting the object, an idea that Hendricks is exploring in his newest work with great acuity, raising the possibility that color is the thing. David Moos

Edward Lee Hendricks
Polychromatics 1973-2005

Exhibition at New Gallery
Opening Saturday, January 7, 2006
Artist’s Reception January 7, 6:00-8:00 pm

In 1973 Edward Lee Hendricks was making paintings in the geometric tradition, taking 48 x 24 x 4 inch masonite and wood panels and sectioning this well proportioned rectangle into various configurations. In one work a blue H form hovers against a gray ground, contrasting with orange areas that fill in the negative space of the H. In other works made from masonite, Hendricks presents spiraling interlocking forms in various colors, offering the eye a rotating counter-balanced geometry. Whirling Mandela-like, these wall-mounted volumes were all executed with a flawless precision and have a uniformly smooth surface attainable only through countless sprayed layers of automotive finish.

In Untitled (1973), the twenty year-old Hendricks applied his painting acumen to two curved forms, bright orange and bending away from each other, set atop a rusted steel pipe reaching twelve feet into the air. This work may be understood to be the embryonic statement of the artist declaring his fascination with visual dynamism and lyrical geometry.

As Hendricks developed his interests in form, animating curvaceous shapes on a rotating mount, so too did his ability as a colorist unfold. Gold becomes a primary element, a constant against which other materials and often bold colors are set. In a series of immaculately crafted circular works from the early 1990s, Hendricks again ponders the difference between painting and sculpture by mounting these optically vibrant objects to the wall. The eye scans the perimeter of the forms, notching off the regularly spaced elements rhythmically, assessing the apparent perfection of the fabrication. Unlike an artist such as Donald Judd who valorized a method of making work that did not involve his own hand, Hendricks is himself intimately involved in the making of his objects, immersing himself within the labor of perfection.

In his most recent work, Hendricks returns to some of his earliest themes and preoccupations. Acurved aluminum sculpture finished in black urethane enamel is set upon a granite pedestal in Untitled (2003). It directly recalls the soaring steel sculpture from 1973, yet now there is a confidence in the relationship between materials that is consummate, a more measured assessment of proportion. This retrospection can also be seen in the zigzagging wall-mounted forms that directly recall Hendricks’s 1973 play on Constantine Brancusi’s iconic Endless Column. In a sense, much of Hendricks’s aesthetic derives from such baselines of twentieth century sculpture. Perhaps Hendricks does not title his work so as to allow viewers to apply their own referential readings, whether those tend in the direction of forebears such as Isamu Noguchi, Minimalists such as Judd and Craig Kauffman, or older contemporary sculptors such as Martin Puryear.

Whatever the range of reference that might be conjured by Hendricks’s work, however, there remains an interior evolution that is striking and consistent, charting a course through the end of modernist sculpture that addresses the primary issue of color. Indeed, Hendricks understood early an insight that the critic Michael Fried articulated about Anthony Caro’s revolutionary use of color in sculpture, noting: “Applied color cannot displace surface; it is itself surface.” Such a characterization gives rise to the primacy of color as constituting the object, an idea that Hendricks is exploring in his newest work with great acuity, raising the possibility that color is the thing.

David Moos