Linda Matalon: New Sculpture

February 03, 1994 - February 26, 1994

The Yoshii Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture and drawings by Linda Matalon. Matalon will debut three new installation-sized works which celebrate the curves and contours of the human form, while voicing quiet laments on the passage of time.

Matalon shares a formal kinship with sculptor Eva Hesse, but as critic Faye Hirsch has noted, “Matalon is very much an artist of her time with bodily allusion decidedly overtaking abstraction in her work.” Matalon’s chosen materials of industrial hardware and wire veiled in gauze bandage and wax suggest a dialogue between dominance and submission, or resistance and release. These qualities politicize Matalon’s art, especially in its articulation of a “marginalized” aesthetic, but her sculpture never forfeits its lyrical sense of mystery or visceral emotional punch.

Matalon’s newest works operate on a larger, more emphatic scale, one which aggressively courts physical response. What Remains, two rows of elongated forms hanging in parallel from a web of tangled wire, is a meditation on communication and transcendence. Another new work, She Blankets the Skin with Secrets, consists of small pillows of waxed wire obsessively sewn together to resemble two large, torso-like forms. As Laura Cottingham writes in her catalogue essay, “The name coaxes the sculpture into a story suggestive of sexual and emotional intimacy that portends distance and frustration.”

Linda Matalon’s work can also be seen next month at the Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art in Ridgefield, Connecticut in “In the Lineage of Eva Hesse.” Matalon has exhibited in group shows at New Langton Arts, Meyers/Bloom Gallery, Simon Watson, and The Drawing Center.