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Tanya Bonakdar Gallery 1997 |
Imagine walking around in a small gallery space, between streched out stockings filled with spice. - The smells, the colors. - Moving carefully...
Ernesto Neto's work made a strong impression the first time I saw it, in 1997, when Tanya Bonakdar Gallery was still located somewhere in Soho where you had to arrive by elevator. It filled the entire room and was quite seductive...
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"Simple and light as a dream...the gravity don’t lie...just loves the time", 2006 Installation view fromTanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York Foto: Fabian Birgfeld, photoTECTONICS. Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York |
"Simple and light as a dream...[...]" is included in the retrospective currently showing at the Astrup Fearnley Museum in Oslo. According to the Norwegian critic Gerd Elise Mørland, the seductive and physical aspects of Neto's work get lost in this big show. Apparently, there just isn't the same possibility to become totally emmersed in the different sculptural installations when they are presented as a collection of separate highlights, rather than sculptural environments that have been created to fill a particular space.
I still checked it out on a trip to Oslo last week, and hoped to be seduced... again...
I enjoyed Neto's almost childish play with gravity, but there was, unfortunately, only one work in which I became completely surrounded by texture and smell, "Stone Lips, Pepper Tits, Clove Love, Fog Frog" from 2008:
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Entering across the "Stone Lips" filled with pebbels, into the body that I thought of as the "Fog Frog", I could smell the "Pepper Tits" and the "Clove Love"...
- Magic, and yes; quite sensual...
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Photo: Librado Romero/The New York Times (From The Armory Show) |
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| "Walking in |
The works in these last two pictures are not included in the Oslo retrospective.
- Can you imagine wandering into the sculpture in The Armory Show?
- Or taking some time off in the "Venus Blue Cave"...
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