In the current show at the Arts Club of Chicago, New York artist Oren Pinhassi explores the relationship of humans to their environment. Pinhassi’s strange yet arresting forms, juxtaposed with recognizable furniture-like shapes create an interesting dichotomy, and although the bulbous sculptural forms are hard, being fabricated from sand and polymer, they give the impression of being either soft or air-filled. When they are paired with or wrapped around the more realistic geometric forms of beds, tables and glazed frames, which are decidedly hard, being made from steel and glass, a fascinating story unfolds.
In the main gallery, the viewer is faced with two pieces in a dialogue of opposites. The piece closest to the door, “Fragile Figure (mother),” includes a boulder, six leaning half cylinders and a fluted skirt-like form out of which a gothic frame filled with glass arises on a paddle-like slab. Across the gallery, in “Orchard,” another boulder is held by two paddle-like forms that each house parallel rows of venetian blind shapes. At the base, the attachment appears to clutch the rock with clawed feet. The most interesting aspect of the show is how the various sculptures play off one another so that you find yourself not only looking at the single piece but moving through the space to see others in relation to it—it is what is “in the background” that makes the sculpture in the foreground more intriguing.
Moving into the other galleries, we begin to see more recognizable forms in the works. One for example, titled “Awe,” stands near a window as if it is looking out. It is in the form of an enormous magnifying glass, and yet, cryptically, there is a large hole in the glass. Once again, the base, a seeming two-toed foot, clutches a rock. In the back of the gallery is a wonderful piece in which two bedframe-like pieces hold a pile of Pinhassi’s amorphous bubbles topped with a glass-framed arch, once again with a large hole piercing it, while two smaller balls sit alone on the edge of the slatted top platform. The lower platform, filled with a sheet of glass, slides half in half out beneath the top, as if it is a trundle bed. In another piece, bubbles rise on a pole from a small round table giving a sense of being an irregular topiary.
In the didactic material it says that Pinhassi’s exhibition “proposes to orient the viewer through a range of physical encounters.” While these familiar but alien forms do provoke mental and emotional connections, they also tweak reality in a way that is essentially disorienting. This is work that requires study and thought as well as an imagination equal to Pinhassi’s for full appreciation.
