A riot, a trip, an ever-changing adventure: the new spring show at the Hayward Gallery is a blast from first to last. Superbly curated by Ralph Rugoff, gallery director, its theme is sculpture from the past 60 years. But nothing rigid, geometric or recondite, nothing stock-still in bronze or carved marble – everything here is breaking free, escaping convention, vividly and often literally restless.
Clouds of twinkling white foam descend almost imperceptibly down the wall, emitting from French artist Michel Blazy’s intricate contraption for conjuring cumuli of puffs, crests and spirals. Blow gently and the lowest clouds shiver. Dancing up and down, from high above, white silk parachutes open and close like fast-blooming flowers in a bewitching kinetic ballet by Dutch duo Studio Drift.
Riffle your fingers through American sculptor Tara Donovan’s shining molecular forms, proliferating to fill an entire gallery, and these mysterious dark spheres rustle and flutter, revealing the discs of cheap Mylar from which they are made – the everyday miracle of DNA, and of sculpture.
No theory is advanced, or indeed contorted, to connect all 21 artists in When Forms Come Alive. It is all there in the title. Everything here is brimming into being, moving from one incarnation into another.
Here is a slender strip of Alaskan cedarwood fashioned into an eloquent curl, then straightening into a graceful drop, by the great US sculptor Martin Puryear. Or so it seems from the side. Stand directly before it and the sculpture resolves into a single exquisite line. Look at the wall-mounted works of Iranian-born artist Nairy Baghramian, in polished wood and aluminium, and they are turning lines into sculptures. A calligraphy of bright lines transform into fishbones, vertebrae, ribcages, even callipers, summoning creatures of all kinds.
What might you do with the humble things you love and cannot bear to throw away? Seoul-based sculptor Choi Jeong-hwa constructs vertiginous towers out of lime green and scarlet plastic baskets from the local market, brilliant columns wonderfully redoubled here in the reflective walls around them. He makes sputniks out of rusty nails, and Korean mountain altars, rising to the sky, out of goat horns, gas rings, shells and saucepan handles. Choi calls these assemblages “holobionts” – each its own microcosm of symbiotic organisms.
The judgment, delicacy and old-fashioned craft of this art is found all through the Hayward exhibition, even in sculptures made out of stranger substances. The French artist Marguerite Humeau works with beeswax, walnut wood and microcrystalline wax to create a tree that mushrooms into clusters of tiered honeycombs, spreading flat like waterlilies or gigantic pale chrysanthemums. Bury your nose deep and the scent is overwhelming. An ambient buzz (in fact a saxophone’s eerie susurrations) seems to come from the translucent globules alighting on the uppermost layers, each holding the venom of a wasp in its honey-gold interior. Something will die (perhaps us) and something will survive (perhaps the bees, and not us). Humeau’s art feels both ancient and ultra-modern.
Rugoff has single-handedly revived the fading reputation of French art with this show. A whole gallery of small sculptures by Jean-Luc Moulène, casually positioned on tables the conversational height of kitchen islands, marries form, word and idea with late-flowering surrealist humour. An iron dumbbell dwindles into an uncoiling spring, and the term dolt immediately springs to mind. The head of hairdryer streams with dark blue tentacles, molten movement stiffening into hard plastic; Méduse is its witty title.
A fabulous rollercoaster by LA artist EJ Hill consists of a wooden structure fitted with pink neon lighting that takes your eye – and your bodily imagination – swooping and speeding irresistibly round the switchback in the looming darkness. Barcelona-born Eva Fàbregas’s giant tangle of pink entrails, or are they ducts, or are they umbilical cords, loops round and round an entire gallery to the pump of electronic music; you can just about squeeze through them, viscerally aware of being caught in some nameless system.
Sound, speed, motion, scent, taste, vision, memory, touch: these sculptures reach through and beyond the senses. There is a marvellously strange work here by the Polish artist Olaf Brzeski that conjures the experience, he says, “of a person who is peacefully dreaming yet simultaneously combusting”. A soot-dark wall bursts forth into a sinister black cloud that mushrooms right out through the gallery space. Dream versus reality played out, here, in the transition from two to three dimensions.
This is a tremendous show. The texts speak directly to the art with nutshell eloquence. The pace is perfect, plenty of room between one work and the surprise of the next, and plenty of space for each sculpture to express itself. The selection is so judicious that you can get the best of grand figures such as Franz West, say, or Phyllida Barlow, in just a couple of works.
And the exhibition is suitably restless in itself about what a sculpture can be, turning over and over all sorts of questions and qualities – shiny or matt, moving or motionless, rising, falling, diaphanous or stocky, speechless or articulate, frightening or comic or tender. It allows you to catch sight of yourself moving among the reflections, to sense the relationship between space and sculpture, to consider your own small being in relation to art that may be vast (or minute) in time and place, and that is always twitching with life.
Beyond Form, at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, is, alas, the exact opposite of When Forms Come Alive. An object lesson, so to speak, is in the overlap between the two shows. The Japanese-American sculptor Ruth Asawa’s intricate tied-wire structures look like what they are at the Hayward – ethereal drawings turning in and out of three dimensions in the air; at Margate they resemble lampshades hung too close to the ceiling. This ill-considered and worse lit miscellany doesn’t even have the courage to put its selling point – two decades of abstract art by women – in the title.
The period 1950-70 was a wondrous era. Here are Louise Bourgeois’s tragic humped forms on the floor beneath Slovakian artist Maria Bartusová’s suspended white Drop – liquid, light and pendant egg in one; Romanian-born New Yorker Hedda Sterne’s glimmering semi-abstract landscapes and Cuban painter Carmen Herrera’s refined and poetic hard-edge abstractions. Mary Martin’s epigrammatic constructions in wood and steel, small-scale, very British, are as poised as the great, shaggy wool-works of American Sheila Hicks are exuberant. There are circular forms in steel and plexiglass, terracotta vessels with seductive openings by Hannah Wilke and some exquisitely precise tapestries, warp and weft inflected like minimalist drawings, by her fellow American Lenore Tawney.
Anyone prepared to make the effort may find revelations in the jostling throng – especially the Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi – but there is so little feeling for the art here that a magnificent Louise Nevelson relief construction is parked like an old wardrobe behind a door, and you cannot see the delicate, tremulous grids of Agnes Martin’s Morning behind the glass for the blaze of reflections.
Any show that includes Eva Hesse’s Addendum is worth the trip – that row of discs on the wall, like mouths, or birds, singing their hearts out, streaming lines falling in cords on the floor. And there is (too) much more. But all these women – some of them so forgotten or marginalised – are presented here like a jumble sale, without space, theme or sympathy, as just one thing after another.
Star ratings (out of five)
When Forms Come Alive ★★★★★
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-70 ★★★
When Forms Come Alive is at the Hayward Gallery, London, until 6 May
Beyond Form: Lines of Abstraction, 1950-70 is at the Turner Contemporary, Margate, until 6 May
