Emser’s sculpture, Wind of Change, is a juxtaposition of contemporary materials, soft strength, and unique vision, not duplicated by other contemporary sculptors, which make his work important to know and wonderful to see. Emser’s frequent use of copper color and aluminum mesh catch light and shadow beautifully, making this sculpture seem to float in the sea.
“As daylight changes from early dawn to high noon to dusk, that color really changes and seems to work well in all types of environments from a rich green landscape to a serene blue seascape,” said Emser. “I’m fascinated by it for that reason.”

This is Bob Emser’s second work to been shown in Cottesloe, the first being in 2010. He has also exhibited his work in 4 exhibitions in Sydney’s Bondi show. The concept for Sculpture by the Sea is the brainchild of David Handley, Founding Director. The exhibition came from Handley’s desire to create a major free public arts event for Perth and Sydney.

Take a virtual tour of the sculptures and show at Cottesloe in all its pristine beauty with people naturally interacting. Here is the link: http://www.virtualtourphotographysydney.com.au/sxscottesloe2011/index.html.

For additional information on this exhibit visit www.sculpturebythesea.com More of Bob Emser’s work can be seen at www.BobEmser.com.

Photoshopped image of proposed "Winged Project" by Bob Emser

EUREKA — Beauty, as we know, is measured in the beholder’s eye.

The eye of Eureka artist Bob Emser has long beheld beauty in the sleek contours of airplane wings.

He describes that allure as “inherent,” regardless of size or scale or position.

A detached wing is no less appealing to him than one firmly in place; an unfinished wing is no less aesthetic than one with its skin on.

This sense of beauty was nurtured as a young boy growing up the son of a mechanical engineer in East Peoria.

Together, father and son would assemble model airplanes, usually made of balsa wood.

“They were probably my first sculptural experiences,” says the internationally exhibited artist and winner of one of the art world’s prestigious honors, the 2010 Pollock-Krasner Award.

“What I really liked about them,” Emser says, “was the sculptural quality of the flat shapes coming together and creating an organic, sensuous form.”

True confessions: “I never completely finished most of the models — just the wings.”

In fact, the framework, or skeleton, of the wing was the true allure, says Emser, more than 40 years past his 10-year-old self.

That probably explains the future architecture student’s added fascination with the unadorned frameworks of subdivision houses under construction, circa the ’60s.

“There is a beauty, there, too.”

Emser’s studio and the grounds surrounding it off the Adams Road blacktop in Eureka are subtle echoes of those early fascinations.

Besides the studio with its 20-foot ceiling, there’s the nearby retirement home he designed for his parents — father Don, now deceased, and mother Jean, who still calls the striking edifice home.

It was created out of an existing uninhabitable space in 2003, and features an exterior sided with stainless steel and squares of cement board — all the better to peacefully co-exist with the array of large-scale Emser sculptures redefining the otherwise typical tract of suburban neighborhood.

Now, courtesy the freedom the monetarily substantial Pollock-Krasner Award has granted, Emser’s imagination is taking wing higher and ever higher, toward a potentially unprecedented scale of public-space creativity.

Titled “Winged Project,” it will ultimately manifest itself, if all goes according to plan, on the sides of a New York City skyscraper or two.

It presently exists in nascent form, on the concrete floor of his studio: the skeletons of airplane wings, created out of wood and serving as the shapes of bigger things to come.

It’s a frankly arresting image Emser has foreshadowed in several Photoshopped images that have fooled more than one observer into thinking the project is finished and in place.

The conjunction of skyscraper and wings would, as he demands of any of his work, “redefine the space.”

He’s fully aware of the implications inherent in the redefinition: “So you may be thinking about the tragedy that occurred in September 2001 and, indeed, I can’t deny that it is a little bit about that.”

He adds, “There’s the idea that you shouldn’t connect these together because of this terrible thing.” But Emser views the connection chiefly in terms of “rejuvenation and innovation –redefining the event in a positive way.”

So instead of the specter of holocaust, he sees the work as a symbol of America and its land of “innovative thinkers.”

He says, “Part of our innovation is because of our freedom and our freedom to think in whatever way we want. A tragedy like 9/11 is something to try to take those freedoms away from us.”

Skyscrapers and airplanes were invented in America; by marrying the two architectural elements together, “they will give us a new awareness of what these spaces and objects are about.”

Emser will test-fly the project on a smaller scale in Chicago, where he is president of Chicago Sculpture International and served as executive director of Pier Walk, the city’s international sculptural exhibition.

He is close to achieving the funding necessary to begin that phase of the project.

In New York, he wants the project to be “high enough on a building so that the open sky can be seen through the framework” (he’s looking at a mid-sized building facing west in Chelsea; Lower Manhattan locations are less practical, he says).

Needless to say, a costly level of engineering will be entailed, along with the cooperation of building owners and other red tape.

For an artist who had taught most of his adult life and didn’t begin his sculpture career in earnest until he was 40, Emser agrees his international success and renown has been gratifying.

The Pollock-Krasner Award, which he ranks at the same level as a Guggenheim Fellowship, is now allowing him to embark on projects that wouldn’t have been possible otherwise.

And he’s having the time of his life launching these flights of meaningful fancy.

“Someone once said that if you can find what you most enjoyed doing as a child of 8 or 10, and then figure out how to make that you’re life’s work, you’ll be a happy person.”

Bob Emser — model airplane builder at 8; something still oddly close to that at 56 — has not violated that maxim.

Read orginal post at Bloomington Pantagraph.com

The Memorial Art Gallery plans to turn its stately lawn, currently defined by a wrought-iron fence, into a playful, almost childlike open-space narrative on sculpture.

“I see it as opening up the grounds like the old town square, people come and sit, read, play guitar, talk, eat, then follow the paths up to the gallery itself,” says MAG director Grant Holcomb. “We are in essence making an urban park.”

For complete article CLICK HERE

By Hallie Jordan

James Surls, the sculptor who had seven of his art pieces installed at Rice University last month, enlightened a crowd there recently about his art philosophy and the ideas behind his plant-like sculptures.

The seven pieces in the exhibit, which arrived February 21, are entitled Magnficent Seven: Houston Celebrates Surls and reflect a connection with nature, featuring titles like “All Diamond,” “Ten Big Standing Bronze Flowers” and “Standing Vase With Five Flowers,” among others. Previous to their appearance in Houston, five of the seven pieces on display were exhibited on Park Avenue in New York.

The sculptures will remain at Rice until August 31.

To Read full article CLICK HERE

March 24 (Bloomberg) — Naked men loom from rooftop and ledge, disturbing pedestrians in lower Manhattan, where British artist Antony Gormley inaugurated his “Event Horizon” installation yesterday.

The 31 life-size figures are almost identical in appearance though they differ in material and weight. The four made of cast iron weigh 1,433 pounds each and the rest in fiberglass weigh 66 pounds each. They were made from body casts of the artist.

“They are tiny little things given the total complexity of the city,” said Gormley, 59, in an interview yesterday, a small thing himself from the perspective of his creations atop the Flatiron building and the Madison Avenue building

Read full review CLICK HERE

New York Artist Robert Indiana’s HOPE was unveiled Thursday at Jim Kempner Fine Art, a Manhattan gallery.

Indiana’s publicist says the artist raised more than $1 million for the Obama campaign by creating HOPE prints, posters, T-shirts and other memorabilia. No decision has yet been made on where the sculpture will be permanently displayed.

The 6-foot stainless steel sculpture was shown privately during the Democratic National Convention in Denver last August.

Versions of Indiana’s classic LOVE sculpture appear in several cities around the world, including Philadelphia.

AP Photo by Francois Mori

The Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden will present a major retrospective of the works of Louise Bourgeois from Feb. 26 through May 17. Bourgeois, a leading figure in 20th century art, is an American who was born in Paris in 1911 and has lived in New York since 1938. The exhibition will fill the museum’s second-level galleries with over 120 works, primarily sculptural pieces, along with paintings and drawings. The last venue on a five-city world tour, the presentation at the Hirshhorn has been expanded to include five more major sculptures. Among them is the large “Crouching Spider” (2003). The nearly nine-foot-tall bronze-and-steel spider has already been installed outside the museum’s entrance, acting as an imposing greeter.

Throughout her 70-year career, Bourgeois has drawn upon personal memories to develop complex meditations on such universal themes as personal identity, family relationships and the power of art to express deeply felt emotions. Her materials range from traditional plaster, bronze, marble and wood to resin, latex, glass, rubber and electric lights, along with found objects such as toy dolls and old furniture and clothes. Bourgeois has an idiosyncratic aesthetic and has adapted and interpreted diverse ideas and styles from Europe and America, notably Surrealism, primitivism, psychoanalysis, conceptualism and feminism.

The exhibition begins with Bourgeois’ early drawings and paintings, notably the “Femme Maison” (1945-47) laced with figurative and symbolic content, images that would recur and evolve in sculptures made decades later. The first significant sculptures on view will be the nearly abstract, totemic standing figures known as the “Personages.” The series culminates in “Blind Leading the Blind” (1947–49) from the Hirshhorn’s collection.

Subsequent galleries present organic compositions suggesting embryonic growth, fertility and the flux of nature, as in “Torso, Self-Portrait” (1963–64) and the exquisitely carved marble “Cloud” (1969). Throughout the exhibition, a number of sculptures are suspended from the ceiling, in one of Bourgeois’ preferred means of suggesting “states of ambivalence and doubt.” The tiny “Spiral Woman” (1984) suggests a vertiginous state of constant yet pointless motion in a vast empty space. The life-size “Arch of Hysteria” (1993) alludes not only to a state of mind but to gender as well: The term “hysteria” was coined in the 19th century to refer to the emotionality of women, but Bourgeois made this figure male because “men are hysterical too.” The eerie “Legs” (1986), also from the Hirshhorn’s collection, dangles from the ceiling with the feet hovering just inches from the floor.

Bourgeois’ first sculpture of an enclosed environment, “The Destruction of the Father” (1974), is visible only from the front, like a stage in a theater. This work is a precursor to the large structured environments of the 1990s known as the “Cell” series, which the artist has explained “represent different types of pain: the physical, the emotional and psychological, and the mental and intellectual.” The “Cell” sculptures originated in the artist’s memories of emotional experiences in her own life, yet ultimately they express shared perceptions of the human condition. The circular “Red Room (Parents)” and “Red Room (Child)” (both 1994) suggest memories of childhood, enclosed like time capsules. Surrounded by wooden doors that do not open, these sculptures only partially reveal their contents to viewers who peer in through restricted apertures. In contrast to the inwardly focused “Red Room” duo, the circular “Cell (Twelve Oval Mirrors)” (1998) faces only outwards with nothing in the center, inviting viewers to contemplate themselves.

The title of “Cell (You Better Grow Up)” (1993) echoes a familiar phrase often used by parents to adolescents, yet the meaning of the contents of this metal cage are difficult to decipher. The message in “Cell (Choisy)” (1990–93) is more direct: a model of Bourgeois’ childhood home is imprisoned behind a chain-link fence and can be accessed only by passing under a terrifying guillotine. In the disturbing “Spider” (1997) composition, a huge black arachnid straddles a steel cage containing an empty child’s chair; the image is mystifying yet immensely powerful.

“Louise Bourgeois” was organized by the Hirshhorn in association with Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris. “Louise Bourgeois” at the Hirshhorn Museum is sponsored by Altria Group Inc. The exhibition is made possible in part by the Agnes Gund Foundation, Glenn R. Fuhrman, Ginny Williams and George R. Roberts. Additional support is provided by the Holenia Trust in memory of Joseph H. Hirshhorn, the Friends of Jim and Barbara Demetrion Endowment Fund and the Hirshhorn’s board of trustees. The presentation at the Hirshhorn is coordinated by senior curator Valerie Fletcher. A 320-page catalog accompanies the exhibition.

Related Programs
The Hirshhorn offers a range of interactive educational experiences designed to engage people of all interest levels in contemporary art. Two special lectures and a film will give visitors an in-depth look at Bourgeois and her works. On Thursday, Feb. 26, at 7 p.m ., art historian Donald Kuspit presents “The Phallic Woman: Conflict and Fragmentation in Louise Bourgeois’ Conception of the Female Body.” On Thursday, April 16, at 7 p.m ., Hirshhorn senior curator Valerie Fletcher speaks on “Louise Bourgeois: The Past as Present.” On Sunday, March 8, at 11 a.m ., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m ., the Hirshhorn screens “Louise Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress, and the Tangerine” (2008), a new film biography exploring the artist’s themes and inspirations, including interviews and studio footage.

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s museum of international modern and contemporary art, has some 12,000 paintings, sculptures, mixed-media installations and works on paper in its collection. The Hirshhorn maintains an active and diverse exhibition program and offers an array of free public programs that explore the art of our time. The museum, located at Independence Avenue and Seventh Street S.W. is open daily from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. and admission is free. Visit www.hirshhorn.si.edu for more information or to download Hirshhorn podcasts on the collection and exhibitions, as well as talks with artists and curators.

Bill FitzGibbons received his BFA in Sculpture and Art History from the University of Tennessee, and his MFA in Sculpture and Multi-Media from Washington University in St. Louis. Bill has received over thirty public art commissions in five countries. In 1979 he became the first curator at Laumeier Sculpture Park in St. Louis, Missouri. From 1985 until 1988 he was appointed as the Director of Sculpture at the Visual Art Center in Anchorage, Alaska. In 1988 he became the Department Head of Sculpture at the San Antonio Art Institute. In 1991 he was selected as a Fulbright Scholar for the Hungarian Art Academy in Budapest, Hungary. Bill has served on the adjunct faculty at Trinity University in San Antonio and has been the Executive Director of the Blue Star Contemporary Art Center since the summer of 2002. Currently Bill serves on the board of directors of the International Sculpture Center.