Description
Seymour Lipton's sculpture is often associated with Abstract Expressionist painting. Like the Abstract Expressionists, he developed his mature style in the late 1940s and early 1950s. His process of directly cutting and welding metal (as opposed to traditional methods of casting sculpture) parallels the spontaneous, intuitive approaches of gestural abstractionists such as Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning, and the rough textures of his sculptures recall the heavily impastoed surfaces produced by these painters. In other significant respects, however, Lipton's work differs: his sculptures contain evocative associations to natural and man-made objects, and his shapes resemble the ambiguous and metamorphosing images of Surrealism more than the forms of the Abstract Expressionists.
Lipton was born in 1903 in New York City, where he lived and worked all his life. After receiving a degree in dentistry from Columbia University in 1927, he trained himself as a sculptor. He had his first solo exhibition in 1938 and has exhibited widely since then. Lipton's earliest sculptures were carved in wood and realistically depicted anguished figures of men and women affected by harsh social conditions. His first pieces after World War II revealed a continuing preoccupation with the brutality of human existence, but around 1949 Lipton began to employ abstract biological forms with less specific associations. By 1950 he was expressing more hopeful feelings in forms that suggested organic processes of growth and regeneration.
In 1945 Lipton began using sheet metal, first sketching his sculptures, then cutting sheets of metal into the preconceived forms that he bent and attached using a torch. Working directly with the metal shapes allowed him to alter them as the piece developed. After covering the outside surface with melted rods of nickel-silver, he reshaped the sculpture where necessary with a hammer. To reinforce the armature he added an inside layer of nickel-silver. The result is a strong, rigid structure.
The Empty Room incorporates the themes and associations that pervade Lipton's later work. An unfurling, curvilinear, yet rigid wall encloses dark hollow spaces. Lipton has said of this work: "Gradually, the sense of the dark inside, the evil of things, the hidden areas of struggle became for me a part of the cyclic story of living things. The inside and outside became one in the struggle of growth, death and rebirth in the cyclic renewal process. I sought to make a thing, a sculpture as an evolving entity; to make a thing suggesting a process." Reproduction of this image, including downloading, is prohibited without written authorization from the Estate of the Artist or by contacting the Curatorial and Tours Services Office at 518-473-7521.
Details
- Work Date:
- 1964
- Location:
- Agency Building 2
- Dimensions:
- 6'-4 1/2" x 2'-7 3/4" x 2'-3 3/4"
- Medium:
- nickel-silver on monel metal