Imagine a revolutionary artwork designed to enhance our lives. Tobias Putrih dreams of such things, as revealed in a survey of his terse, difficult early career now on view at the Neuberger Museum of Art in Purchase.
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At 34 years old, the New York-based artist is in demand. He is now representing his native Slovenia at the Venice Biennale; he has a show at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York and another in St. Louis; and he is doing a project for the Frieze Art Fair in London this month. That is a busy schedule for any artist.
It has always been this way for Mr. Putrih, who seemed to burst — fully formed — onto the international art scene in 2002. He had had some previous shows, mainly in Ljubljana, and in Berlin, but it was his involvement in 2002 in Manifesta 4, a European biennial for contemporary art held in Frankfurt, that really made his reputation. He exhibited small papier-mâché models of local cinemas; they worked both as attractive sculptural objects and as intellectual propositions, inciting viewers to think about relationships between reality and fiction.
Mr. Putrih’s cinema sculptures, which are showing here, are not exact copies of the cinemas. He invested them with imagination and invention, cutting up the paper representations of the projection screens as part of a wider proposal for reshaping the viewing experience. It was an interesting idea, suggesting the distortion of perceptions and its effects on the sensations of viewers.
Thom Collins, director of the Neuberger Museum, saw these works in Frankfurt and decided to give Mr. Putrih a show. Fast forward to 2007, and the show is perhaps more and less than Mr. Collins might have hoped. For starters it is enormous, with more than 50 works on display, many monumental in scale, almost everything crammed into the museum’s giant central gallery.
Mr. Putrih is a young artist, bursting with energy and ideas and a desire to show us everything he has made and is working on. That is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a terrific exhibition. All artists need to be edited, and this show could probably have been trimmed by about a third without any loss of focus. There are too many examples of the same sort of work, not all of them of equal interest or quality.
But cut away the superfluous and there is a great core here, beginning with a pair of interactive sculptures at the museum’s entrance. One of them consists of interlocking wooden planks creating an abstract structure that creeps up and over the museum’s reception desk; the other is a meandering, flexible floor sculpture made of aluminum poles attached together with little plastic clips in the shape of letters. Visitors are invited to adjust and modify both pieces.
Collaboration is a central tenet of Mr. Putrih’s art. In addition to interactive sculptures, the show features examples of his three “Macula” series, which are tall arrangements of circular shapes, cut out of thick corrugated cardboard by hand or a computerized saw. The sculptures were made collaboratively. The artist would draw a circle or another shape on a piece of paper and then invite volunteers to duplicate the design. Each volunteer’s drawing would be based on the one before it, gradually amplifying the deviations from the original. These shapes were then used as the basis for the series.
On another level, many of Mr. Putrih’s free-standing sculptures might be considered collaborations, for they seem to consistently take ideas and theories from the arts, architecture and the natural sciences as their point of departure. One of the works here is a model of an unrealized project proposed by the artist Robert Smithson before he died; another is a reworking of Buckminster Fuller’s model for the geodesic dome. Yet another explores the theories of the visionary Romanian theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect Frederick Kiesler.
Of course, knowing this and seeing the artworks are different things. Mr. Putrih’s sculptures are often flimsy and junky-looking, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of mundane materials like plastic foam, paper, packing tape, cardboard and twist ties. They look as if they may collapse at any minute. It also comes as no surprise to learn that several were badly damaged in transit and had to be repaired by the artist before the opening.
But in some ways the appearance of these sculptures is beside the point, for Mr. Putrih is a conceptual artist. He is interested in crazy, utopian concepts and propositions. I don’t think it is a coincidence that in addition to cinema, one of his other great passions and sources of inspiration is science fiction. Like that essentially futuristic genre, his artworks deal with what could be, not what is.
“Tobias Putrih: Quasi-Random,” Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through Dec. 9. Information: www.neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.
Skip to next paragraph
Multimedia
Audio Slide Show
Bursts of Creativity
In the Region
Long Island, Westchester, Connecticut and New JerseyGo to Complete Coverage »
At 34 years old, the New York-based artist is in demand. He is now representing his native Slovenia at the Venice Biennale; he has a show at the Max Protetch Gallery in New York and another in St. Louis; and he is doing a project for the Frieze Art Fair in London this month. That is a busy schedule for any artist.
It has always been this way for Mr. Putrih, who seemed to burst — fully formed — onto the international art scene in 2002. He had had some previous shows, mainly in Ljubljana, and in Berlin, but it was his involvement in 2002 in Manifesta 4, a European biennial for contemporary art held in Frankfurt, that really made his reputation. He exhibited small papier-mâché models of local cinemas; they worked both as attractive sculptural objects and as intellectual propositions, inciting viewers to think about relationships between reality and fiction.
Mr. Putrih’s cinema sculptures, which are showing here, are not exact copies of the cinemas. He invested them with imagination and invention, cutting up the paper representations of the projection screens as part of a wider proposal for reshaping the viewing experience. It was an interesting idea, suggesting the distortion of perceptions and its effects on the sensations of viewers.
Thom Collins, director of the Neuberger Museum, saw these works in Frankfurt and decided to give Mr. Putrih a show. Fast forward to 2007, and the show is perhaps more and less than Mr. Collins might have hoped. For starters it is enormous, with more than 50 works on display, many monumental in scale, almost everything crammed into the museum’s giant central gallery.
Mr. Putrih is a young artist, bursting with energy and ideas and a desire to show us everything he has made and is working on. That is understandable, but it doesn’t necessarily make for a terrific exhibition. All artists need to be edited, and this show could probably have been trimmed by about a third without any loss of focus. There are too many examples of the same sort of work, not all of them of equal interest or quality.
But cut away the superfluous and there is a great core here, beginning with a pair of interactive sculptures at the museum’s entrance. One of them consists of interlocking wooden planks creating an abstract structure that creeps up and over the museum’s reception desk; the other is a meandering, flexible floor sculpture made of aluminum poles attached together with little plastic clips in the shape of letters. Visitors are invited to adjust and modify both pieces.
Collaboration is a central tenet of Mr. Putrih’s art. In addition to interactive sculptures, the show features examples of his three “Macula” series, which are tall arrangements of circular shapes, cut out of thick corrugated cardboard by hand or a computerized saw. The sculptures were made collaboratively. The artist would draw a circle or another shape on a piece of paper and then invite volunteers to duplicate the design. Each volunteer’s drawing would be based on the one before it, gradually amplifying the deviations from the original. These shapes were then used as the basis for the series.
On another level, many of Mr. Putrih’s free-standing sculptures might be considered collaborations, for they seem to consistently take ideas and theories from the arts, architecture and the natural sciences as their point of departure. One of the works here is a model of an unrealized project proposed by the artist Robert Smithson before he died; another is a reworking of Buckminster Fuller’s model for the geodesic dome. Yet another explores the theories of the visionary Romanian theater designer, artist, theoretician and architect Frederick Kiesler.
Of course, knowing this and seeing the artworks are different things. Mr. Putrih’s sculptures are often flimsy and junky-looking, cobbled together from a hodgepodge of mundane materials like plastic foam, paper, packing tape, cardboard and twist ties. They look as if they may collapse at any minute. It also comes as no surprise to learn that several were badly damaged in transit and had to be repaired by the artist before the opening.
But in some ways the appearance of these sculptures is beside the point, for Mr. Putrih is a conceptual artist. He is interested in crazy, utopian concepts and propositions. I don’t think it is a coincidence that in addition to cinema, one of his other great passions and sources of inspiration is science fiction. Like that essentially futuristic genre, his artworks deal with what could be, not what is.
“Tobias Putrih: Quasi-Random,” Neuberger Museum of Art, 735 Anderson Hill Road, Purchase, through Dec. 9. Information: www.neuberger.org or (914) 251-6100.
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