Sabin Howard’s sculpture studio is located in upper Manhattan in an old factory building near the East River. The neighborhood, which consists primarily of three- and four-story structures, is undergoing a real estate boom much like the one downtown experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, when the first waves of artists seeking good light, and cheap and open space gentrified their lofts. Howard’s studio is reached by three double-flights of stairs. A wall has been removed from one side of the studio to allow space for the seven-foot-high statue of Hermes Howard has been working on ferociously day and night for the last fifteen months. Privately commissioned and cast in bronze at the Tellex Foundry in Beacon, New York, Hermes will be installed at the Millenia Gallery’s public space in the new TimeWarner Building in New York City. The unveiling is scheduled for April 29, 2005. According to Millenia Gallery director Robert Lombard, Hermes “brings humanism and narration to a modern setting. Its energy cannot be ignored.”

For anyone interested in figurative sculpture, the year began with a notable event, as J. Johnson Gallery in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, presented twenty-one monumental and life-size bronze and terracotta works by the extraordinary Mexican artist Javier Marín. The works, weighing over 200 tons, were flown in from Mexico City. Over fourteen feet long, the bronze Chacmol (2001) exemplified both his epic thinking and his art historical reach. The reclining figure—knees bent, head turned towards the viewer—mimics an ancient Aztec configuration. At the same time, the modeling of the face and the eloquently oversized hands and feet are reminiscent of the nineteenth-century sculptor Rodin; the distortion is especially telling in the Burghers of Calais. Deeply connected to his own cultural heritage, Marín adds pre-Columbian influences to his creative mix. The workings of individual contributions to the art historical continuum are always intriguing. Rodin based his Gate of Hell, in part, on Ghiberti’s Gates of Paradise at the Bapistry in Florence, for example. Like Michelangelo, an artist he obviously admires, Marín understands both the principles of classical form and the expressive possibilities

Javier Marín, Cabeza Tubichino, bronze, 2002 Courtesy J. Johnson Gallery

of roughly handled materials. The muscularity and weight of Chacmol has a barely controlled energy that recalls the Renaissance master’s figures of Day and Night, Dawn and Dusk from the Medici Chapel, as well the heroic contortions of the Bound Slaves. And like Michelangelo, Marín grasps the notion of the “unfinished” masterpiece, where evidence of the struggle of wresting form from raw material becomes part of the theme. There is one kind of artistic miracle in the polished legerdemain of marble imitating flesh; there is another, equally valid, in Marín’s primordial hand-shaping.

“Enigma Variations: The Sculpture of John Frame, 1980–2005,” this Spring at the Long Beach Museum of Art, looked back at the career of an idiosyncratic California artist whose haunting sculptural installations combine crafted wood and found objects. Frame (b. 1950) has a background in theater, dance and literature. His small-scale figurative tableaux draw on a long tradition of theatricality, suggesting puppet shows, medieval morality plays and commedia dell’arte. Many of his titles are taken from Shakespeare and—without being in any way illustrative—resonate with poetry.