Rarely is the traditional meaning of the word monumental so cogently relevant as it is to Peter Voulkos’s 1967 bronze colossuses, two of which are at the David Stuart Gallery. In turning from ceramics to bronze-casting, Voulkos undertook a series of hugely ambitious tasks. The results are commensurate with the controlled objective. Voulkos has been said to first cast shapes which interest him, and then to weld them together with only a tentative expectation for the results. This seems unlikely. In this exacting medium sheer fortuitousness is rarely a finally determining issue.
Hiro II, with its two components, spans a total length of 31 feet. It is of cast bronze and aluminum. This piece—to again call upon old-fashioned adjectives—reaches heroic, epic proportions. (The sense of epic as opposed to anecdotal applies quite strictly to Voulkos’s sculpture.) A massive tubular arm of bronze inclines up from the ground, coils, rises to meet a straight post jutting at an angle, against its side, then twists down, knotting in two chunky bullet-nosed pieces, then snakes down, coils once more and straightens, leaning up to a stop. The surface of the bronze is warm, potent, hard, energetic. At its up-tilted end, standing a little away, is the “feminine” component—an eight-foot-tall table-shaped monolith of welded aluminum with one bronze leg. In antithesis to its counterpart, the four-legged unit is cool, stable and essentially inorganic. The two pieces do not automatically interrelate; each is a remote entity, joined by the willful, convincing choice of the artist.
Dunlop (13’ x 7 1/2’) is self-contained but no less heroic in scale or content than the sprawling Hiro II. Its generative direction of force is toward the center; the compact energy depends upon a principle of conflict. With its serpentine bronze arms winding on the periphery of the solid clashing central forms it is strongly evocative of the Laocoon. These peculiar wedged-out bullet-like forms which Voulkos has used repeatedly in his bronze sculptures have an extraordinary expressive function here butting against each other at the core of the work, surrounded by massive bronze entrails.
—Jane Livingston
