ARLENE SHECHET

In Speaking of Drawing (2022)—a large-scale, 3D drawing in space—Shechet merges opposites, from lightness and heaviness to femininity and masculinity. Made of both hand-carved and constructed painted wood, this work, which features negative space running around and through it, functions more as a drawing than as architecture. Every view is dynamic, with accentuated lines of black and pale pink shifting in composition when experienced from various vantage points.

Made of ceramic, steel, and wood, all separately cast, Teasing and Squeezing (2022) features plays in scale. With compacted energy and colour miraculously cast, this sculpture is a textural, eccentric piece. Its forms come together in unexpected ways and contrast the earthbound with the elevated. In the intimately scaled work With Wet (2022), light is absorbed and reflected in white gold leaf as the blue crystals in the sculpture’s glaze play with its iridescence.

Shechet will also show three new pieces from her ‘Together’ series, which meditates on modes of keeping and marking time and has been the subject of exhibitions at Pace’s Palo Alto, East Hampton, and Hong Kong galleries. Colour breaks loose in this series, forming a bright palette that is rendered in glazed ceramic in dynamic conversation with steel supports saturated in colour. These rich abstractions seem to melt into and around their supports, highlighting both balance and precarity.

Shechet’s long-term exhibition Disrupt the View: Arlene Shechet at the Harvard Art Museums is open through July 6, 2025. This presentation at the Harvard Art Museums in Cambridge, Massachusetts brings Shechet’s recent sculptures, including work created during her 2012 residency at the Meissen factory, in conversation with historic porcelain from Germany, Japan, and China.

On Saturday, January 7, Shechet will join Laura Hoptman, Director of the Drawing Center New York, for a talk hosted at The Bunker Artspace in West Palm Beach.