The first sculpture in Thaddeus Mosley’s spectacular show “Proximity” is an assembly of four roughly wishbone-shaped pieces of carved walnut that stands 6 ½ feet tall. He calls it “Arboreal Choreography.” Seen from the gallery’s front door it does indeed bring to mind a well-dressed dancer in a self-conscious pose, thumbs in braces, one toe raised. From the end of a nearby bench, though, it becomes a complex jungle of shadows, creases, cracks and reinforcements, with brown and off-white tones so rich and various that you’d almost think he painted them on. As you pass alongside, it all becomes something else again.
Mosley, who was born in 1926, has also worked in assemblage, sourcing miscellaneous objects from a Pittsburgh junkyard owned by Andy Warhol’s brother; one piece in the current show is mounted on a found lamp stand. In the past few years he’s also taken up casting, and a group of his recent bronzes will soon be installed in City Hall Park in Manhattan. But since he started making sculpture in Pittsburgh in the 1950s, the Pennsylvania native has chiefly worked with hardwood, enlisting every last bit of its natural aesthetic splendor, as Noguchi did for stone.
Many of the pieces in “Proximity” express more singular thoughts than “Arboreal Choreography.” There are stools, wooden embraces, and several notched spirals that culminate in a majestic, nine-foot-tall column topped by a jaunty half pipe. Two sculptures made of locust wood are so shiny and yellow that they call to mind glazed French confections, at least for the moment. (Exposure to the air will eventually turn them brown.) It’s not that any of these things are simple — you could almost see “Curvilinear Reach” in a graduate-level math course — just that they’re easily taken in as wholes. Still, even in the most straightforward pieces, Mosley weaves together heady pairs of opposites: stillness and motion, curves and straight edges, intimacy and grandeur, conscious intention and organic growth.
“Sonic X24” leans back like a debonair narwhal, and in “Crossroads,” a blade-shaped length of walnut notches a semicircular piece that evokes a slice of melon. In “Flight Form,” a rounded, hollow piece of dark brown walnut sits horizontally atop a ballet-toe-shaped column.
Viewed from the middle of the room, it brings to mind a flayed beef carcass of the kind that Chaim Soutine liked to paint, a bulging, numinous stand-in for the universe itself. But Mosley ends his universe with 12 square projections, as if to impose some human order and decision onto the natural world. From the other side the same form reveals a crackling cavity full of esoteric mystery.
Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity
Through May 23, Karma Gallery, 549 West 26th Street, Manhattan; (212) 717-1671, karmakarma.org.
Will Heinrich writes about new developments in contemporary art, and has previously been a critic for The New Yorker and The New York Observer.
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