The Hess Art Collection

Throughout his career, most of Goldsworthy’s work has been made in the open air. The materials he uses are those to hand in the remote locations he visits: twigs, leaves, stones, snow and ice, reeds and thorns. Most works are ephemeral but demonstrate, in their short life, Goldsworthy’s extraordinary sense of play and of place.

Homage has a great deal of personal meaning for Maler himself, however.  His uncle, a well-known Argentinean journalist, was killed for the inflammatory content of his political essays.  The old Underwood Typewriter that now emits flames in the place of words is of the same style that Maler’s uncle used during his esteemed career. Marta Traba, art critic and theorist for Latin American Art, wrote before her death that Maler’s typewriter is the ultimate symbol of Latin America Art.

The textural sculptures of Magdalena Abakanowicz reflect not only her attraction to the natural and organic, but also her memories of the desolation and brutality of a childhood in war-torn Poland. The daughter of a baronial landowner, Abakanowicz was forced to flee her rural home after the Second World War when the Soviets confiscated it. As a young artist in Warsaw, she lacked the money to buy materials traditionally used in sculpture and turned instead to the detritus of communist industry, much of which she initially found on the docks of her adopted city. Her visceral works highlight their crude media – whether burlap, bronze, or found wood – while at the same time expressing an internal spirit so powerful that they become oddly noble signs of a displaced humanity.