Indoor Sculpture 1988-1994

Michael Singer has created indoor sculpture since the early 1970s; these works span the time period from 1988-1994. 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. In 2019 the American Academy of Arts and Letters named Singer a recipient of their Arts and Letters Award in Art. 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:

“Singer’s structures seem responsive to myth, but it’s hard to name the myth they embody. These structures are stages for a tableau but the rite that is to be performed on them is mysterious.”

“Singer’s work is on the verge of history…elegant and eloquent. The stone is like hardened cloud, the wood rises delicately heavenward.  Singer’s structures have always been close to nature, demarking the flow of natural space. They metaphorically function as a mental horizon in which we can be conscious of and catch natural flow without crystalizing it.”

Donald Kuspit    Art in America Magazine “Caves and Temples”

“Singer seems able to draw with wood, and his sculptures have the rhythmic cadence of Oriental calligraphy.  The work is so finely tuned that merely touching it seems likely to change everything.  His sculpture has a ceremonial function. Like the art of the American Indians, it distills its elements from nature and through the formal rites of art, pays nature a kind of homage in return.”

Mark Stevens      Newsweek Magazine

Below is a selection of Michael Singer’s indoor sculptures from 1988-1994.

Sculptures are listed in the order of the slides:

Ritual Series. 1990, wood, granite, fieldstone, copper, iron, bronze. 230 x 230 x 75″. Collection of Williams College Museum of Art. Gift of Dr. William Fishkind.

Ritual Series/Retellings. 1988, wood, granite, fieldstone. 150 x 360 x 72″ Collection of Davis Museum and Cultural Center, Wellesley College. Gift of Robert Orton.

Ritual Series/Maps of Memory. 1994, wood, granite, fieldstone, lead, copper. 255 x 141 x 75.5″.

Photography: David Stansbury