Arlene Shechet
“Skirts”
New York, 540 West 25th Street Second Floor
Running concurrently with the Whitney Museum’s exhibition Making Knowing, which also features works by Shechet, Skirts brings together more than a dozen of the artist’s most recent sculptures, including large-scale works and a monumental outdoor piece to be displayed on the second-floor galleries and terrace of Pace’s new flagship building at 540 West 25th street.
Rich in idiosyncrasies, Shechet’s latest pieces combine disparate mediums, from ceramics to wood and metalwork, with playfully ambiguous titles that prompt endless associations. Utilizing a title that is both a noun and a verb, Skirts is a testament to the artist’s fluid and unformulaic process. Though her works appear effortless and forgiving of imperfections, they are the belabored products of an intuitive and technically fastidious approach, involving casting, painting, firing, carving, stacking, undoing and redoing with no predetermined endpoint. Her expansive approach to sculpture and materials is reminiscent of artists Shechet admires, such as Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Sonia Delaunay, whose work transcends the divisions of painting and sculpture and encompassed innovative multimedia practices, distinguishing their work from that of their male peers. Shechet’s title, Skirts, also reclaims misogynist slang. As if to counter this term’s reduction of women to passive things, Shechet’s unruly, polymorphous sculptures suggest that objects themselves are active and subversive.
