Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Thaddeus Mosley
American; 20th-century, 21st-century
New York, NY: Karma Gallery (Exhibition: Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity)
84%
Khari's Bird. 2025. Walnut and sassafras
If there's a mannerism to Mosley's work — an out-of-step insistence on the relevance of Brancusi's stacks and Calder's motion and Noguchi's invaginations and the gangly presences of Giacometti — it's more than justified by the experiential richness which his art, at its best, offers up. This piece is a standout from the artist's 2025 show at Karma. One aspect of its quality is the way Mosley's wrought its surface with gouges and divots. These interventions work with and then, by turns, against the grain and the shapes of the wood, such that the total object appears both painstakingly made and spontaneously occurring. Then there's the sculptural unity of the thing. Though it comprises two pieces of wood, the individual qualities of each are channeled into the overall effect of the whole. The success of this channeling has to do with the way the sculpture's base tilts slightly in the opposite direction of the upper piece's outward fanning; with the way that that upper piece is impossibly narrow from some perspectives and impossibly wide from others, putting the weight of the lower block in a state of constant proportional shift. (TFS, 2025)
New York, NY: Karma Gallery (Exhibition: Thaddeus Mosley: Proximity)
59%
Suspended Petal. 2025. Locust, walnut, and maple
Mosley's off when he's relying too heavily on (what seems to be) the naturally given physiognomies of his pieces of wood. Nor do his amalgam sculptures — the ones made of several pieces of wood that don't combine into a unified whole — tend to be among his best. The man's a synthesizer, not an appropriator, juxtaposer, or combiner. He's at his best when he's blending disparate patterns and forms together, rather than when he's emphasizing their disparities. This work, then, is comparatively weak because the yellow of its top piece makes the bottom two blocks of wood into something of a pedestal; because the top and the bottom chunks are so clearly duplicates of each other that the middle piece struggles to relate; and because the planarity of the top piece makes it seem like there's a correct and an incorrect angle from which to view the thing. There are saving graces, however: the yellow stump's tilt; the evidence of Mosley's hand all over the surface of the sculpture. (TFS, 2025)