Skylines as Sculpture

Gordon Binder

October 27 - November 20, 2021

Over the past year plus, I’ve been looking at and reading about the work of Anne Truitt, Donald Judd, and Ellsworth Kelly, about the lives of these artists and their inspirations.

The forms and shapes these artists created had some appeal to me.  I read about Kelly’s experience in Paris after WWII, visiting the studios of Alexander Calder and other artist friends, he would emerge on the street, taken by the forms and shapes he saw in the Paris skyline. That led him to begin producing his trademark paintings, in the 1960s single color panels, sometimes a grouping of panels, then later canvases crafted as an oval, a triangle, or another shape.

For some time now, I’ve been drawing and painting cityscapes and urban skylines.  Looking at the work of these artists, I had one of those ah-ha moments, a leap into seeing urban skylines as sculpture, a collection of monoliths not unlike what these artists created. 

To be sure, Judd’s work was chiefly horizontal, Kelly’s not quite but still for me a statement of minimalism, abstraction, what have you -- they leant themselves to visualizing urban skylines as minimalist works of art.

I decided to pursue the monolithic forms as a theme for this fall’s show, Skylines as Sculpture.

In preparing for the exhibit, I looked over my earlier artwork and realized I had been incorporating this idea from the start.  I’ve included some older work to chart the evolution of the theme.