Robert Braczyk: Cardinal Directions

Bowery Gallery is pleased to present “Cardinal Directions,” an exhibition of new sculpture by Robert Braczyk. For many years a prize-winning figurative sculptor, Braczyk in recent years has turned to abstraction. For this new exhibition, the artist has assembled vertical compositions that echo figural forms, but whose abstract vocabulary of open volumes and discontinuous contours suggests the possibility of multiple allusions. Each work evinces a powerful spatial tension between the cardinal point from which it is begun and the complex three-dimensional image that Braczyk builds with primary thrust, axis, and meridian. Much like the verticality of a standing figure influences all other decisions that a sculptor makes, a deeply felt impulse toward a major direction is the starting point for all of these pieces. Like a temporal through line connecting the events of a life, each sculpture originates at a foundation point in space and time and then leads to a three-dimensional resolution, an object with innate authority for being.