
Ted Odza and Mildred Lachman
Quay Gallery
A curious interaction of formal elements exists between Odza, a sculptor and Miss Lachman, a painter. Odza’s sculpture draws vitality from the open metal tradition which began with Gonzalez and continues in the work of David Smith. A recent graduate of U.C., Odza became involved in the tradition via his instructors, Sidney Gordin and Wilfrid Zogbaum, both familiar practitioners of the linear space-enclosing sculpture idiom. His single variant on a now well-known theme is his use of very heavy metal components giving his sculpture a certain massiveness usually lacking in welded sculpture.
Miss Lachman’s paintings, while less dynamic in structure than her co-exhibitor’s work, contain the same spatial resolutions two dimensionally as does Odza’s three dimensionally. A black stroke against a white ground in Lachman’s painting serves the same space-defining purpose as a length of arcing round bar stock does in Odza’s sculpture.
Miss Lachman’s solutions to the problems of form, space and color are far too simple. Her work suffers from an overly facile paint handling which she could easily cure by more intensive digging into the possible resolutions of each picture she paints.
Odza’s sculptural difficulties are of a different nature; he seems faced with so many formal possibilities and sculptural concepts that rather than reject many for the one, he samples a number of them. It is a perfectly valid process in discovering a direction, albeit a confusing one for the viewer.

