William Noland - Sculpture

1979 - 2023

My work in sculpture has been made in conversation with the built world, both through an interest in the overlap between sculpture and architecture as well as in the way three-dimensional art can be abstracted to conjure and reference human scale and the world of functional objects.

Black Pool 1996-99 h. 31” x w. 96” x d. 228” wood, steel stainless steel, iron, cement, plexiglas

SPECIFIC SITES

Sculptures about human presence and our consciousness of movement through space, these pieces began as carefully preserved spatial improvisations which are then subjected to a far longer process of connecting, engineering and refining, giving them the rigor of carefully calibrated, self-contained systems. MORE

SURFACE RELATIONS

This series of sculptures initially used both the wall and floor as support surfaces, later continuing as free-standing sculptures that utilized planar surfaces within a given sculpture that functioned as wall or floor., focusing particularly on a viewer’s likely movement through space, over time. MORE

TOWERS, MONUMENTS, APERTURES

Sculptures that explore permutations of verticality: balanced constructs, stacked material, silhouettes, structures with significant openings or gaps. MORE

TENTS & ENCLOSURES

Rudimentary configurations in bronze and clay that explore architectonic structure and enclosure. illustrating flux states that suggest structures either in formation or coming apart. MORE

Other Websites: William Noland - Photographs William Noland - Films

From “An Inadvertent Vanguard” by Karen Wilkin — The Hudson Review, Volume IV Number 1 Spring 2002

William Noland’s recent sculptures are like recollections of inhabited places. For many year, he has worked with lumber cannibalized from sources ranging from derelict furniture to abandoned houses, employing a language of building and joining that echoes the previous history of his materials. Lately, he has added steel and plexiglas to his palette, at once strengthening the associations with building and enriching his range of colors and textures. Noland’s complex structures can seem improvised, cobbled together; narrow strips or fragile planes are ganged into dense masses that can seem temporary or casual. Fragmented “walls,” schematic “windows, “ collapsed “railings,” and blocked “entrances” make his sculptures seem domestic and vernacular, like disintegrating real outbuildings. But Noland’s four-square planar constructions soon begin to read not only as distillations of architecture, but also as reinventions of Cubist painting space in three dimensions. Although these ramshackle “places” are scaled to the human body, subtle distortions of expected proportions and placements further divorce them from the literal; “windowless” takes the place of “window,” “the possibility of passage” replaces “entrance.” The metaphorical replaces the specific, but overtones of human presence, both past and imminent, persist.