Flashback- NYC Art Shows- Thaddeus Mosley at Karma in 2023

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Public Art, Sculptors / Sculpture
Jun 202025
 

The hand carved wood sculptures above were created from 2020-2022 by Pittsburgh artist Thaddeus Mosley and were on view at Karma in NYC in 2023.

From the gallery’s press release-

In a recent photograph taken in his studio, Thaddeus Mosley peers between the soaring columns of his sculptures. They are gallant constructions of wood, each hand-carved and formed out of unique sections from three to four logs. With his chisel, Mosley exalts the warm tones and woodgrain which lay beneath the outer tree bark. His dimensions vary, ranging from monumental to modest, rounded to angular, vaulted to hovering just above the ground. Their presence is determined by Mosley’s negotiation between natural materials and an exploration of weight and space. A feat of balance, his sculptures exist in a constant state of suspension: heavy sections seem to float above the delicately-carved pieces that support them.

Mosley began creating wooden sculptures in the 1950s while working at the United States Postal Service, which enabled him to both provide for his family and develop his craft in his free time. At 96 years old, Mosley continues his life’s work as an artist in his Pittsburgh studio near the Allegheny River. A strong influence in his practice can be traced to his encounter with a photograph of African American grave markers in Georgia. According to Mosley, their slender, soaring forms called to mind Constantin Brâncuși’s Bird in Space (1923). He explains that “in each of them I saw a similar spirit, a similar approach to clean fluid shapes coming from people working close to the earth and trying to fuse the earth and human spirituality into a single form.”

Mosley allows the natural forms of wood to guide him toward a conceptual and aesthetic meeting point, where European modernism meets the abstract and interpretive traditions of West African mask-making, and the movement of his chisel captures the rhythmic improvisations of a Jazz soloist. Mosley’s process bears traces of Isamu Noguchi’s own navigation of natural materials, providing new meaning to the late sculptor’s adage that “it is weight which provides meaning to weightlessness.”

Working primarily in hardwoods such as walnut, cherry, and chestnut, Mosley reveres the surfaces he uncovers with his chisel: deep lustres, arcs of bright coloration, growth rings, and the shadowy depth within deep cuts. Panoramic Quarter (2021) brings together inverted forms, in which recessed spirals and connected logs create a dramatic inflection. Horizontality is emphasized in Phase of a Phrase (2022), while Path of Pendulum (2020) delights in the vertical movement of arching forms, which are composed in a gravity-defying embrace. His work dances with viewers as they encircle it.  Mosley’s dynamic forms encourage deep looking, whether it is in Id (2021), a low, conical carving, or Southwestern Suite (2021), in which monumental sections seem to vanish when viewed at specific angles. In Elegiac Stanza for Sam Gilliam (2022), Mosley honors the life of the abstract painter and close friend through a lyrical intersection of walnut, varying between hewn and smooth surfaces.

On rare occasions, Mosley has incorporated salvaged metals into particular pieces of hardwood. In the case of Industrial Collage (2022), a curved cut of steel is affixed to a base of walnut, from which Mosley has balanced two pieces of chestnut, adorned with pounded metal that has been grounded off from the steel section. Mosley salvaged the steel piece from an abandoned industrial building, where it was previously used as a support beam for an industrial fan. It stayed with him in his studio for fourteen years while Mosley waited, searching for the right slab of wood. Each piece of wood, every material for Mosley is subject to this process of aesthetic consideration: a three-dimensional call-and-response.

His work can currently be seen in City Hall Park in NYC for the exhibition Touching the Earth, on view until 11/16/2025. The eight bronzes included were cast from wood sculptures he made between 1996 and 2021.

For more information on the artist- this ARTNews article is an interesting read.

NYC Art Shows- Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori at Karma

 Art, Art Shows by Location, Artists, New York Art Shows, Painting / Painters
Apr 112025
 

“King Alfred’s Country”, 2006. Acrylic on linen

“Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater”, 2005. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2006. Acrylic on canvas

“Dibirdibi Country”, 2010. Acrylic on linen

The expressive paintings pictured above, currently on view at Karma, are by the late Aboriginal Australian artist Mirdidingkingathi Juwarnda Sally Gabori who began painting in 2005, at eighty-one years old. Learning that her paintings are focused on the land she was forcibly relocated from adds an extra layer of poignancy to the work.

From the gallery-

The Kaiadilt artist’s original, nonrepresentational iconography, based on interlocking shapes, passages of pure color, and visible brushstrokes, depicts her primary subject, Bentinck Island, in Australia’s Gulf of Carpentaria, using the language of abstraction. Gestural marks trace the path of rivers; milky white forms indicate the incursion of cyclones; diagrammatic structures map the patterns left on the ocean floor by dugong grazing on seagrass. Rendered from memories of a home she was forced to leave, Gabori’s paintings are, in her words, “about a story place way out to sea.”

Gabori began painting in 2005 around the age of eighty-one. While she started small, working horizontally on a tabletop, the artist soon began using wall-mounted surfaces as large as nineteen-feet wide, moving her body across her compositions as she applied acrylic straight out of the tube and mixed wet on wet directly on her canvases. The resulting paintings, which she made in the last decade of her life, often focused on six significant locations, or Countries, as the Kaiadilt refer to them, on Bentinck: Mirdidingki, Dibirdibi, Dingkari, Makarrki, Thundi, and Nyinyilki. To make these works, Gabori drew on recollections of the island’s topography: its saltpans, reefs, and mangrove swamps; the freshwater pond where she collected waterlilies; the various rivers that run alongside where she, her father, and her husband were born. In 1948, Gabori and the rest of Bentinck’s population were forcibly relocated by Christian missionaries to the nearby Mornington Island. There, parents were separated from their children and the Kaiadilt people were forbidden from speaking their language. Gabori spent the rest of her life on Mornington, only able to visit Bentinck temporarily after the passage of Australian laws that restored Kaiadilt access to the land in 1994.

Rock Cod Story Place – Freshwater (2005), one of the earliest works in this exhibition, visualizes Dibirdibi Country, the area of Bentinck associated with her husband Pat through the Kaiadilt system of naming people after places, as well as the Rock Cod, a being that, according to Kaiadilt cosmology, created the island. Concentric, ovoid rings of unmixed color radiate out from a central mass like the ripples of freshwater that flow into the island’s estuaries. The nearly neon Dingkarri (2006) associatively maps the contours of an islet that was an important fishing ground for the Kaiadilt community. Rather than a literal depiction of the Country’s appearance, Dingkarri is instead a pictorial manifestation of tides in flux: by mixing acrylics on the canvas itself, Gabori created morphing color fields that suggest movement.

Though developed autonomously from Western art history, Gabori’s painterly syntax nonetheless evokes the oeuvres of the American Abstract Expressionists. Evidence of Gabori’s hand is everywhere in My Country (2009), which celebrates Mirdidingki, her birthplace. Working rapidly, she brushed together magenta and white to create a variegated field that morphs as it stretches across the vertical canvas. Close looking reveals a subterranean wash of yellow acrylic peeking through from behind Gabori’s urgent brushstrokes, complicating what at first appears duochromatic. Her jagged, brushy edges and embrace of unadulterated black call to mind Clyfford Still; her arcing, interlocking forms provoke comparison with Amy Sillman. The gestural Didirbidi Country (2010) reads as an exploration of the relations between shapes that abut each other, creating craggy borderlands at their intersections. Beyond its formalism, the work is a recollection of the stone fishing trap walls maintained by Kaiadilt women that branch off of Bentinck’s coastline. In addition to specific cultural meanings and associations encoded in paint, the works convey an affective charge that transcends geography, temporality, and identity.  Refracted through memory and mediated by dispossession, Gabori’s paintings are a living archive of a homeland.

This exhibition closes 4/12/25.