Wendell Castle: A year of Celebration
2012 – 2013

2012 marks a banner year for Wendell Castle, Americaʼs foremost sculptural-furniture artist. Now in his 80th year, Castle is being celebrated for his over half-century of iconic work and his indefatigable investigations within the realm of furniture design. Beginning next fall, a roster of exhibitions at museums and galleries will be accompanied by the publication of a comprehensive catalogue raisonné – a project years in the making, and a rare event in the world of contemporary design. While the museums will focus on retrospective reflections, Castle will unveil an entire new body of work in two consecutive solo shows at his Chelsea galleries, Barry Friedman and Friedman Benda. The new work, so ambitious in form and idea, marks a bold and powerful new chapter in a career that continues to evolve.

A guide to major events, Fall 2012:

• Wendell Castle: Wandering Forms—Works from 1959–79, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
(October 19, 2012 – February 24, 2013)

• Wendell Castle: Volumes and Voids, Barry Friedman, New York, NY
(October 25 – December 22, 2012)

• Wendell Castle: Forms within Forms – The 21st Century, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky
(November 29, 2012 – February 4, 2013)

• Wendell Castle: A New Environment, Friedman Benda, New York, NY
(December 2012)

• Wendell Castle: Catalogue Raisonné, Hudson Hills Press
(Release Date: December 2012)

• Wendell Castle: The Unicorn Family, a Major Public Commission, Rochester Memorial Gallery, Rochester, New York
(2012 – 2013)

Details on Events:

• Wendell Castle: Wandering Forms—Works from 1959–79, The Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut
(October 19, 2012 – February 24, 2013)

The Aldrich Museum will focus on the nascence of Castleʼs career, showing his great leaps of the 1960s-70s, into stack-laminated wood and fiberglass furniture, that originally set Castle aside from his peers.

• Wendell Castle: Form within Form – The 21st century, The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, Louisville, Kentucky
(November 29, 2012 – February 4, 2013)

The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft will present the proliferation of sculptural ideas manifested in Castleʼs last decade of work. From wood and fiberglass to concrete and metal, Castle began the 21st century by creating complex sculptural furniture, inventive interplays of solids and voids that offer a heightened sense of movement, and endless perceptual opportunities. Within these works, Castleʼs decades-deep understanding of balance, weight and material is underscored by a renewal of ideas. As evidenced by the exhibition, the first years of the 21st century, Castleʼs drive to create unencumbered iterations of sculptural form and mass took a step forward.

• Wendell Castle: Volumes and Voids, Barry Friedman, New York, NY
(October 25 – December 22, 2012)

The exhibition at Barry Friedman Ltd will feature a series of new unique and limited edition furniture, each with a generosity, freedom of expression and confidence in execution not seen before. Multiple dimensions are explored as Castle expands on the possibilities of voids and volumes. Castle augments, re-configures, and gives girth to many familiar shapes – mirror-image chairs, a settee, desk and tables – and the end result is of a new magnitude – fluidly merged, amorphous elements form surprisingly functional furniture.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is an installation – a grid of nine unique wood tables, each emanating from an identical stack-laminated base and each taking on a differentiated identity as it rises to the tabletop. The repetition of identical bases create an illusion that each table is formed from a solid block, referencing classical Greco-Roman figurative sculpture in which the base tends to be left in raw form, showing the origin of the material as it develops upwards, almost organically.

• Environment, Friedman Benda, New York, NY
(December 2012)

For Friedman Benda, Castle will produce a major work – an installation of stacklaminated pieces spanning two-stories, set into an iron base. Incorporating seating pieces, a table, a lamp, and a spiral staircase leading to a tree house, or nest, the piece invites dreamers to imagine. A culmination of Castleʼs own history of ideas and the resolution of a formidable technical challenge, this environment offers Castleʼs public a bewitching play of abstraction, function, and fantasy.

Self-referential and set into its own floor, the environment is a room without walls, a gesamtkunswerk, where elements relate to each other, invite interaction, and are rife with repeating aesthetic motifs.

In 1969, Castle produced an “environment for contemplation,” a stack-laminated podlike chamber with a hinged door where one could ensconce and reflect. The new environment, 43 years later will be exponentially more complicated to craft; the spiral staircase for example, appears to have regular step intervals but in fact will be built on a zigzag so that it can be hooked into the nest above. With this environment, the formula is reversed, Castle opens his work up to the public, seeking to redefine and reset relationships.

• Wendell Castle Catalogue Raisonné,
Hudson Hills Press (Release Date: December 2012)

Rarely has there been a Catalogue Raisonne dedicated to the work of a living designer in America and certainly the career of Wendell has required one. Steadfast, prolific, and central to the history of furniture innovation in America over the course of the last fifty years, Castleʼs catalogue raisonné is a resource much in demand. Meticulously documenting each phase in the legendary designerʼs output, the catalogue will cover approximately 1700 works and publish scholarly essays by Glenn Adamson from the Victoria & Albert Museum, London and Jane Adlin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The 500+ page catalogue will be published by Hudson Hills Press and a book signing, on a 2012 Wendell Castle desk, will take place at Friedman Benda alongside an exhibition of new work.

• The Unicorn Family, a Major Public Commission, Rochester Memorial Gallery, Rochester, New York
(2012 – 2013 )

The Memorial Art Gallery has commissioned a monumental cast-iron sculpture by Castle as one of the anchor installations of its planned Centennial Sculpture Park. The piece (working title Unicorn Family) will measure 22 feet in diameter and consist of a gathering area with a table and three chairs and a 13-foot LED lamp. A maquette of the work, which is scheduled to be installed in 2013, is currently on view in the Galleryʼs Vanden Brul Pavilion.

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