Terry Adkins
Further images
1: Installation view of Nenuphar, Salon 94 Bowery and Salon 94 Freemans, New York NY
2: Harvest Richmond, 2013
3: Harvest Manassas, 2013
Harvest was first exhibited in the recital Nenuphar at Salon 94, New York, a body of work that engaged with the affinities between the lives of the artist Yves Klein (1928–1962) and George Washington Carver (1864–1943), a former slave who rose to prominence as a revered agricultural chemist and inventor, and who was also a practising painter who developed his own paint pigments. This body of work makes wide-ranging references to botany, agriculture, religion, music and ancient Egypt, which are expressed with reference to the four elements according to Classical philosophy: earth, fire, air, and water. Harvest is a suite of five sculptures formed from irregular spheres of glass hand-blown through the wire teeth of apple pickers, which casts the common farm tool as a collector of ‘air’. The work also makes reference to Klein’s notion of ‘le Vide’ (the Void) and Carver’s research into varied aspects of agriculture and alternative farming methods.
Exhibitions
Nenuphar, Salon 94, Bowery, and Salon 94, Freemans, New York NY, 30 October 2013 – 11 January 2014
Literature
Berry, Ian, ed, Recital, Saratoga Springs, NY: The Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum Art Gallery at Skidmore College; New York, NY: Prestel Publishing, 2017, p. 241 ill.