Personal Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Alison Saar
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: Midway International Airport
69%
Sleeping Beauty. 1991. Wood, tin, paint, plastic
The overworked surface and gauche coloration (paired with the fact that I saw it in an airport) made me think at first that this sculpture was some horrible craft thing. But after I learned it was Saar, the stiff contrapposto started seeming poetic rather than stilted, and I began to notice how the head's severe cock recasts as almost pathological all of the body's other slight movements. Plus that base is too perfectly irregular to have been the happy accident of even the most intuitive of artists. Still, nothing could make up for its surface and the way that yellow sits on the mottled green below it, even if the way it comports itself comes impressively close. (2024)