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Outsider Artist

February 26, 2009 by Marion Maneker

snelson_sleeping_dragon_Forbes brings back Kenneth Snelson by reminding us of his show in Chelsea:

In this new era of cleansing and purging, 82-year-old artist Kenneth Snelson’s elegant sculptures, made of shiny metal tubes that appear to float or dance in the air and are held together by aluminum wire, look particularly prescient–never mind he has been doing them for five decades now. They are, with their rational basis in math and science and their clean modernist aesthetic, the perfect antidote to the postmodern, self-referential and celebrity art of the early aughts.

“There’s not a whiff of irony involved in Ken’s work,” says Dale Lanzone, director of the Marlborough Chelsea Gallery in New York, which is currently showing an exhibition of the artist’s work. “There is not an echo of art talking to art. His sculptures are serious things.” The 14-piece exhibition, spanning the artist’s entire career, includes “Wood X-Piece,” started in 1948; the undulating 76-foot-long “Sleeping Dragon” (2003); and Snelson’s impressive model of the atom, a network of stainless steel circles that took him more than 40 years to complete.

Master of Metal (Forbes.com)

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Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: Sculpture

About Marion Maneker

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