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Indepth Arts News:
"Howard Ben Tré: Interior/Exterior"
2000-07-01 until 2000-10-01
San Jose Museum of Art
San Jose, CA,
USA United States of America
A nationally-touring mid-career retrospective of cast glass sculpture by internationally
recognized artist Howard Ben Tre is on view at the San Jose Museum of Art until
Sunday, October 1. Organized by the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, the
exhibition is an overview of the artist's work from the mid-1980s through the present.
Howard Ben Tre: Interior/Exterior examines the artist's interest in ancient cultures,
classical architecture, and human experience, and is comprised of 30 sculptures, 11
works on paper, a video about the artist, and maquettes and photographs from four
public art projects.
Howard Ben Tre, whose work is often
compared to Constantin Brancusi and
Isamu Noguchi, is widely regarded as a
pioneer in the use of cast glass as a
sculptural medium. His pale green
monolithic forms transmute the medium
into stunning works of art that are at once
timeless and contemporary. Ancient
architecture and architectural elements
inspired Ben Tre's earliest floor-based
series - Cast Forms, Structures, and
Columns. As his work progressed, he
developed an interest in bringing
overtones of the vessel and the figural
into his work.
In his catalogue interview with Patterson
Sims, Ben Tre states, After years of
focusing on the supremacy of the vertical
and its architectural references, I wanted to
explore ideas based on landscape and the
non-Western perception of the earth as the
ultimate power source. The following
series - Figures, Primary Vessels, and
Basins - directly and indirectly reference
the human figure and ritual receptacles in
sculptural terms, featuring internal cavities,
tool-like shapes, and vessel-like forms.
Figural references became abstracted in
the later series, Wrapped Forms, which
was inspired by ancient Eastern traditions
of wrapping temple fragments to denote
sacredness. In Ben Tre's most recent
series, Bearing Figures, the vessel form
as a metaphor for fertility is used to create
works in sandblasted glass
encapsulated by granite or bronze; Ben
Tre states: Most of the Bearing Figures
were intended for siting outdoors and, not
coincidentally, the glass vessels are
borne within the protective 'surround' of
granite or bronze. Of course, again there
is the duality of outer and inner. The
figural surround narrows as you walk
around the sculpture and the full volume
of the vessel and its penetration of the
figure bearing it is revealed. Enclosed
within the vessel is a cavity that is lined
with metal leaf and appears to be a solid
inclusion. In these works, Ben Tre has
unified the interior and the exterior - the
intellectual, the sensual and the spiritual -
in a harmony of concrete forms.
In his essay Arthur C. Danto states of Ben Tre's oeuvre, The body of work which
began by celebrating the machinery and the dignity of industrial labor, has evolved
into a tribute to forms of life more primitive than our own by far, based on spirituality
and ritual, and for whom no fitter emblem can be imagined than the translucent
substance of which its structures are made.
Born in Brooklyn, Howard Ben Tre resides in Providence, Rhode Island, where he
earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Design. The recipient of many
awards, including three NEA Fellowships, his work is in numerous private and public
collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; the Hirshhorn Museum and
Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; the Museum of Fine
Arts, Boston; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art;
The Corning Museum of Glass in New York; and The National Museum of Modern Art
in Kyoto, Japan, among others. Howard Ben Tre's sculpture has been exhibited
nationally and internationally for more than two decades.
The exhibition is accompanied by a 164-page four-color publication, with essays by
Mary Jane Jacob and Arthur C. Danto and an interview with the artist conducted by
Patterson Sims.
Howard Ben Tre: Interior/Exterior was organized by the Scottsdale Museum of
Contemporary Art, Scottsdale, Arizona, and curated by Debra L. Hopkins, Curator of
Exhibitions. The exhibition tour and catalogue are made possible in part through the
generous contributions of Stuart and Maxine Frankel, Benson and Francine Pilloff,
George and Dorothy Saxe, Jon and Mary Shirley, Robert and Vera Loeffler, and Jack
and Becky Benaroya.
IMAGE:
11th Figure, 1988,
cast glass, brass, gold leaf, pigmented waxes,
54 1/2 x 15 x 13,
collection of Daniel Greenberg and Susan Steinhauser,
copyright and courtesy of the artist
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