Mac Whitney: Sculptures from the 1970s
For over a half century, the monumental sculptures of Mac Whitney have conjured a profound identification and magnetic power on all who engage them. Working without assistants or fabricators, his hands-on approach to metal makes poetry out of industry. Few sculptors have imbued raw steel with new life as magically as Whitney. Every fold, hollow, plane and bulge is given lively form, producing a sense of dynamism, as if the inert material were pulsating with metaphysical energy. For decades, his 50-foot high, 50,000-pound welded steel construction, painted fire engine red, has loomed alongside a stretch of Houston's I-10 corridor with the force of a thunderbolt.
Writing about the monumental works for a 2001 exhibition at Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, the esteemed dealer, curator and former museum director Edmund P. Pillsbury described Whitney as "the foremost abstract sculptor in Texas and arguably one of the region's most accomplished living artists." Experience taught Whitney an essential point鈥攖hat sculpture is an engineering problem, one that deals with manipulating or defying the constraints of gravity. In Whitney's sculptures, the surfaces are pierced, pitted, channeled or intertwined so the whole looks like multiples in a writhing embrace or whirling dance. Every alignment, every lyrical hairpin curve speaks of aesthetic decision. Industrial components are almost invisibly but flexibly joined together. Currents ebb and flow from one surface to another, thus unleashing the hidden life held within the form.
Distilled, self-assured, historically conscious without being mannered, the sculptures derive their strength from the artist's personal mechanics and intuitive vocabulary he has gradually built up over the years. Each vibrates. As in the best jazz compositions, they are works of the inspired instant, approximating the freely drawn swiftness of calligraphy. As vehicles for negative space, Whitney's sculptures evoke those by David Smith, which allow emptiness to seep in鈥攏ot so much displacing space as defining and activating it. Whitney also shares a similar penchant for primitive sources and "drawing" in space. The works reference, as well, the lyrical impulses of Alexander Calder and George Rickey. Moreover, the juxtaposition of curvilinear and angular elements belongs to the same tradition as Mark di Suvero's expanded view of sculpture from something that inhabits and intersects with space on a grand scale. Yet Whitney, always a loner, was never a part of any movement. To that end, he refused to valorize the art object over "blue collar" labor.
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For over a half century, the monumental sculptures of Mac Whitney have conjured a profound identification and magnetic power on all who engage them. Working without assistants or fabricators, his hands-on approach to metal makes poetry out of industry. Few sculptors have imbued raw steel with new life as magically as Whitney. Every fold, hollow, plane and bulge is given lively form, producing a sense of dynamism, as if the inert material were pulsating with metaphysical energy. For decades, his 50-foot high, 50,000-pound welded steel construction, painted fire engine red, has loomed alongside a stretch of Houston's I-10 corridor with the force of a thunderbolt.
Writing about the monumental works for a 2001 exhibition at Pillsbury Peters Fine Art, Dallas, the esteemed dealer, curator and former museum director Edmund P. Pillsbury described Whitney as "the foremost abstract sculptor in Texas and arguably one of the region's most accomplished living artists." Experience taught Whitney an essential point鈥攖hat sculpture is an engineering problem, one that deals with manipulating or defying the constraints of gravity. In Whitney's sculptures, the surfaces are pierced, pitted, channeled or intertwined so the whole looks like multiples in a writhing embrace or whirling dance. Every alignment, every lyrical hairpin curve speaks of aesthetic decision. Industrial components are almost invisibly but flexibly joined together. Currents ebb and flow from one surface to another, thus unleashing the hidden life held within the form.
Distilled, self-assured, historically conscious without being mannered, the sculptures derive their strength from the artist's personal mechanics and intuitive vocabulary he has gradually built up over the years. Each vibrates. As in the best jazz compositions, they are works of the inspired instant, approximating the freely drawn swiftness of calligraphy. As vehicles for negative space, Whitney's sculptures evoke those by David Smith, which allow emptiness to seep in鈥攏ot so much displacing space as defining and activating it. Whitney also shares a similar penchant for primitive sources and "drawing" in space. The works reference, as well, the lyrical impulses of Alexander Calder and George Rickey. Moreover, the juxtaposition of curvilinear and angular elements belongs to the same tradition as Mark di Suvero's expanded view of sculpture from something that inhabits and intersects with space on a grand scale. Yet Whitney, always a loner, was never a part of any movement. To that end, he refused to valorize the art object over "blue collar" labor.
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