Robert Murray at Barbara Edwards
Canadian sculptor Robert Murray’s new exhibition is up at Barbara Edwards Contemporary, Toronto. Displaying the artist’s works on paper and in steel, the show will run March 20 - April 18, 2015.
Border Crossings conducted an interview with Murray, “Dances with Steel,” for Issue 70: Abstractions, now out of stock.
“Baroque architectural facades invite the eye to move rhythmically over their surfaces. This roll and dip is something Murray seeks in reading the topography over which he flies his small yellow airplane. He describes it as a roller-coaster ride. Looking at his work, reading it as a viewer, we join him in ocular transit.
His interest in flight is manifest in the work, in his cantilevering forms out into space, in the parallels he draws between the pieces and the lift experienced on take-off. He brings to the work, indeed, infuses the work, with a certain quality of weightlessness which lends a consistency to his suggestion that includes an invitation to dance. In order to dance there must be balance, equilibrium and this, too, is present. Lennon Yellow, 1980, is one such dance, a pas de deux in metal where the layered sheets adhere invisibly and the space between them is held, touching only at some point and only enough. Two dancers come together out of movement, one supports the other, the moment is held, fixed, they move apart and once again there’s space and motion.
In the independent conduct of his life and art, in the restraint out of which he makes his elegant work—always exactly enough but never withheld—there’s a profound sense that Robert Murray has fully achieved an admirable and satisfying lightness of being.”
-from Border Crossings’ introduction to “Dances with Steel,” based on the interview conducted in February, 1999.
