Indoor Sculpture 1970-1987

Michael Singer has created indoor sculpture since the early 1970s; his earliest works continue to influence and inform his contemporary sculptural spaces and public art. Singer has had several one-person shows, most notably at the Guggenheim Museum, New York City and most recently at the Utzon Center in Aalborg and the Danish Architectural Center in Copenhagen, Denmark. Michael Singer’s sculptures are part of public collections in the United States and abroad, including the Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark; Guggenheim Museum, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Singer has participated in a number prominent exhibitions including the Guggenheim’s “Ten Young Artists Theodoron Award Exhibition,” The Kunsthaus Zurich’s “Mythos and Ritual,” and The Museum of Modern Art, New York City “Primitivism in the 20th Century.”

Below is a selection of quotes on Michael Singer’s indoor sculptures and installations:

“The best large sculpture in the Whitney Biennial is a delicate construction of wooden slates, curled and woven through one another and supported on stones, by Michael Singer.  Its ancestor is Giacometti’s The Palace at 4 a.m.  There is a similar feeling of spindliness, fragility and, isolated in its museum cell, a mystery.”

Robert Hughes     Time Magazine, Referring to First Gate Ritual Series 1978

“Singer’s structures resonate with the spiritual aura usually associated with religious art. In much of Singer’s work executed since 1980 there is a feeling of self-containment. These are structures whose ‘walls’ act, not as barriers as they do in Western architecture, but as gates that lead into the interior, evoking fences.  The walls and the platforms that connect them introduce us into a sequence of measured spaces.  These magical enclosures evoke ritualistic associations and encompass a universe that is part nature, part myth. Through his arresting evocative sculpture and drawings Michael Singer gives significance and form to both life and art.”

Diane Waldman   Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, “Michael Singer” catalogue

Below is a selection of Michael Singer’s indoor sculptures from 1970-1987.

Sculptures are listed in the order of the slides:

Ritual Series 80/81. 1980-1981, wood, fieldstones. 58 x 207 x 217”.  Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. (slides 1-3)

First Gate Ritual Series 10/78. 1978, wood, stone, phragmites. 108 x 156 x 180”. Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Cloud Hands Ritual Series. 1985, wood, granite, fieldstones. 68 x 160 x144”. Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum International Sculpture Exhibition, 1985, Courtesy of Sperone Westwater, Inc, New York City.

Ritual Series / Syntax. 1986, granite, wood and fieldstones. 60 x 144 x 120”

Ritual Series 80/81. 1980-1981, wood, fieldstones. 58 x 207 x 217”.  Collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York.

First Gate Ritual Series. 1982, granite, slate, fieldstones. 30 x 144 x 72”. Collection of the Hirschorn Museum of Art, Washington D.C., gift of Vera List.

Cloud Hands Ritual Series 80/81. 1980-81, pine, ash and stone. 57 x 171.5 x 201”. Collection of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark.

Limit Balance III. 1971, steal I beams, 336 x 180 x 36”  (left)  Unit Balance I. 1971, wood. 48 x 108 x 60”  (right)   Installation View, Ten Young Artists: Theodoron Awards, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1971.

Cloud Hands Ritual Series 83. 1983, granite, fieldstones. 26 x 105 x 64”.

Photography: David Stansbury and Michael Singer

Time lapse Installation of First Gate Ritual Series 10/78 Sculpture