Albright-Knox Hosts Petah Coyne Sculptures

Monday, 05 June 2006 09:57

Buffalo, NY---Following a four venue national tour, the exhibition Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, will have its final presentation in Buffalo from June 9 through September 10, 2006.  A selection of impressive sculptures from 1987 to 2004—some free-standing and others suspended from the ceiling in dramatic chandelier-like cascades—will be on view along with eight large-scale photographs that reveal Coyne’s interest in recording sensation and movement.

Combining both figurative and abstract traditions and deploying a diverse range of materials, Coyne’s sculptures constitute a complex language—decidedly individualistic and yet surprisingly accessible.  She has persistently transformed variable spaces into palpable environments, each context determining the works’ dynamics—its character, associations, and metaphorical significance.

Over the last 17 years, she has maintained a protean pace, constantly challenging herself to engage diverse spaces and to experiment with new media.  A shortlist of materials used—wood, hay, soil, tar, chicken wire, black sand, white powder, silk flowers, wax, dry wall, religious statues, taxidermy, hair, ribbons, bird cages, and other found objects—confirms the extent to which experimentation drives her sculptural aesthetic, documented in her exhibition history by an ever-changing rosters of materials and forms.

In 1999, Fairy Tales, an exhibition of taxidermy, woven and dyed horse hair, and statuary, transformed the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny, Ireland into a dark and brooding landscape of morbid beauty and transcendence.  More recently, White Rain (2001), a reference to the black rain that marked Hiroshima’s victims, altered the neutral space of a New York gallery into another tangle of signs and images, likened by many views to a space of mourning and vulnerability.

As different as each body of work appears, together they share central and dialectic experiences: the precariousness of human existence, the poignant proximity of beauty to decay, of death to life.  These contradictions—the essence of Coyne’s worldview—inform everything she does, including her work in photography.

A mature artist open to a continuing and surprising evolution, Coyne is at a notable point in her career.  This 17 year survey encompasses all phases of her development, including Brides in Mourning, wax chandeliers, Fairy Tales, work from the White Rain installation, as well as two more recent sculptures, Daphne (2002-2003) and Life Interrupted (1997-2004).

Visit The Albright - Knox Art Gallery at : http://www.albrightknox.org/