On view
American, 1951
Bea Blue, 2024
Aluminum, paint
13 ft. 1 in. x 14 ft. x 9 ft. 9 in. (398.8 x 426.7 x 297.2 cm)
Gift of the artist and Pace Gallery. Additional funds provided by Storm King Art Center.
Photo by David Schulze
Best known for her innovative approach to ceramics and her lively use of color, Arlene Shechet’s artistic career spans more than thirty years. She started working in clay in 2007 and in the subsequent years has established her own distinctive style and sensibility toward the medium. Shechet maintains a spirit of constant discovery as she mines the possibilities of multiple sculptural materials, experimenting with their capacity to hold color and light while creating form and volume.
Shechet first explored large-scale outdoor sculpture in the form of ceramics in her 2018 exhibition Full Steam Ahead, installed in Madison Square Park in New York City. For her monumental 2024 exhibition at Storm King, Girl Group, Shechet created six large-scale sculptures in painted aluminum and stainless steel. Working in collaboration with multiple local fabricators over the course of three years, the artist fluidly alternated between analog and digital methods, extrapolating from her ceramic series Together to invent new forms in metal through an open-ended process of call and response.
Bea Blue, like each of Shechet’s outdoor Girl Group works, incorporates both matte and glossy surfaces, which reflect and absorb the landscape so that no two views of the sculpture are the same. The work’s appearance changes with the light and the weather, and also with the viewer’s movements, shifting in color from shiny robin’s-egg blue to sleek sky blue with accents of raw aluminum. For the artist, “sculpture is always about movement and the body,” and Shechet’s works encourage visitors to approach them from different angles to observe how their palette transforms in an ever-changing environment. Perpetually interested in process, Shechet chose to leave visible the marks made by a bump break, a machine used for bending metal, so that the rounded planes of Bea Blue appear to have been folded and unfolded like paper. Bea Blue’s title, like those of the other works in Girl Group, suggests a feminine presence, proposing a new direction within the historically male-dominated tradition of constructed metal sculpture.
Shechet first explored large-scale outdoor sculpture in the form of ceramics in her 2018 exhibition Full Steam Ahead, installed in Madison Square Park in New York City. For her monumental 2024 exhibition at Storm King, Girl Group, Shechet created six large-scale sculptures in painted aluminum and stainless steel. Working in collaboration with multiple local fabricators over the course of three years, the artist fluidly alternated between analog and digital methods, extrapolating from her ceramic series Together to invent new forms in metal through an open-ended process of call and response.
Bea Blue, like each of Shechet’s outdoor Girl Group works, incorporates both matte and glossy surfaces, which reflect and absorb the landscape so that no two views of the sculpture are the same. The work’s appearance changes with the light and the weather, and also with the viewer’s movements, shifting in color from shiny robin’s-egg blue to sleek sky blue with accents of raw aluminum. For the artist, “sculpture is always about movement and the body,” and Shechet’s works encourage visitors to approach them from different angles to observe how their palette transforms in an ever-changing environment. Perpetually interested in process, Shechet chose to leave visible the marks made by a bump break, a machine used for bending metal, so that the rounded planes of Bea Blue appear to have been folded and unfolded like paper. Bea Blue’s title, like those of the other works in Girl Group, suggests a feminine presence, proposing a new direction within the historically male-dominated tradition of constructed metal sculpture.
