PHYLLIDA BARLOW

Employing a visual vocabulary developed over the past five decades, Barlow’s works are often painted in vibrant colours, the seams of their construction left visible, revealing the means of their making. tilt marks a new stage in Barlow’s practice, as she shifts her focus from the immersive built environments of her past presentations–which often riffed on the architecture of their installation spaces, transforming their surroundings–in favour of more autonomous, stand-alone sculptures that invite viewers to consider the works on an individual basis. They block, straddle, and balance precariously throughout the gallery, challenging viewers into a new relationship with the sculptural object.

Upon entering the gallery, visitors are confronted with Barlow’s towering untitled: tilt(lintel); 2018. Roughly hewn from industrial materials including cement, scrim, plywood, and steel, the sculpture’s title alludes to support beams that span doorways or windows. Here, Barlow has stripped the architectural threshold down to an essence, its shape ambiguous and its purpose subverted. As visitors pass underneath untitled: tilt(lintel); 2018, their movement is almost immediately blocked: where the shadow of the construction would appear, Barlow has made manifest its form. She relishes in the transformation of these objects and has said ‘The translation from something actually observed to the thing it becomes, I hope, gets more and more eroded and blurred until it can’t remember what it is meant to be.’

At once menacing and playful, imposing and delicate, additional large-scale works on view stretch the limits of mass, volume, and proportion, drawing visitors into equally intriguing physical encounters. Barlow’s enormous untitled: hung4; 2018 suspends from the gallery’s ceiling, while her untitled: female (2); 2018 stands more than ten feet tall, towering over the gallery space. Elsewhere, the restless, arched forms of untitled: boundfence; 2018 and the colossal untitled: sign; 2018 hint at objects that typically direct or impede our movement through the urban environment.

At the centre of the gallery are new small-scale sculptures that provide a powerful counterpoint to the massive constructions that surround them. Here, Barlow continues her negotiations of space by propositioning the viewer with a more intimate interaction. Standing between five and seven feet in height, works including untitled: dancer; 2018 and untitled: slope; 2018 appear totemic yet vaguely anthropomorphic. Barlow’s plinth sculptures, such as untitled: sleeve; 2018 and untitled: pointer; 2018, play on notions of classicism and perceived value, their roughly made forms offering a lesson in what it takes for everyday objects to become art. Colour animates their surfaces, rendering a delicate friction that engages the eye as it climbs from base to top. Together with the other works on view in tilt, these precarious-looking sculptures critique monumentality while emphasising the transient, absurd, and often joyous encounter between an object and its surroundings.

In conjunction with tilt, Barlow’s recent commission, prop, for the High Line remains on view through March 2019. Drawing inspiration from a sculpture she presented outside the British Pavilion at the 2017 Venice Biennale, prop consists of two large concrete panels, with holes cut from their centres, set on stilts. The towering sculpture appears like a character teetering among the planks at its base and emerging from the planting beds below. prop is the first artwork ever presented on the Northern Spur Preserve at 16^th Street, a location that allows for unique views both from the High Line and the avenue below.