AT 91, BRIAN WALL ARRIVES IN COLORADO
Wall to Wall
At ninety-one, London-born sculptor Brian Wall brings his stainless steel work Skye to the Green Box Arts Festival in Colorado, part of a decades-long practice in welded steel that began in postwar St. Ives.
THE ARCS OF stainless steel that intersect in Brian Wall’s Skye (2019) appear deceptively lightweight for the around 1,500-pound sculpture. Installed at the Green Box Arts Festival this summer in Green Mountain Falls, Colorado, the geometric forms seem frozen in motion, like calligraphic brushstrokes, and catch the shifting light throughout the day. The large-scale abstract piece is part of Wall’s Squaring the Circle, a recent series in the London-born, California-based artist’s decades-long career. At ninety-one, he is still looking forward to how this installation of his work will offer new perspectives on an artistic practice that began in the 1950s.
“For the artist, everything in the studio is private, and then once it leaves the studio, it belongs to everybody,” Wall says. “When a piece goes out, I can see it in a different light and how it interacts with other people. Artists are in the business of making a difference, making people think, and giving people experiences. So, for me, when it goes into a place like this, that’s the exciting part.”
Wall is a featured artist at this year’s Green Box Arts Festival, with his sculpture on view through a collaboration with Museum Exchange, an online platform started in 2020 to match art institutions with art donors. Julie Maguire, a Green Box advisor who is also the director of the Brett Weston Archive and head of collections for the Christian Keesee Art Collection, says the piece’s minimalist style and dynamic lines were immediately eye-catching.
“It has this finish to it that’s almost sort of shimmery and really moves along with the actual curves,” Maguire says. On the Green Box campus, it joins other works installed amongst the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, including a Skyspace by James Turrell and a towering kaleidoscopic piece by Yaacov Agam. “Over time, we’ve realized that we radiate towards things that are about light. It wasn’t intentional, but it’s been a key theme that comes up again and again. And with Brian’s sculpture, the way the sunlight reflects off of it is just beautiful.”
Part of what gives Wall’s work this airy feeling despite its heavy material is his preference for working intuitively with steel. Although many artists use maquettes as models for large-scale work, he has cut and welded his sculptures improvisationally, allowing ideas to take shape in process. This spirit of experimentation goes back to the beginning of his career when he served in the Royal Air Force as an aerial photographer before exploring painting in the early 1950s.
His shift to sculpture was informed by his time in St. Ives, Cornwall, a postwar hub for abstraction led by artists including Ben Nicholson and Barbara Hepworth, for whom Wall worked as an assistant. While his initial sculptural work involved painted wood constructions, by 1956 he was using welded steel, a material that he would employ throughout his career, always finding new ways to create tension and balance. After he moved to California in the early 1970s, he used more tubular forms along with sharp lines that gave the pieces an industrial edge. In the 1980s, his works were often painted in bold primary colors. A throughline across the years is a sculpture’s interaction with its environment, particularly when it was outdoors on a street or in a landscape.
“Henry Moore said if you put a sculpture next to a tree, the tree wins every time. I’ve always remembered that,” Wall says. “If you go back in time and you look at sculpture that has been in public places, like Michelangelo and then Rodin, it does take a real presence. Sculptors know that if you’re going to go up against Mother Nature, you have to have a real sense that you can compete in a way for the space.”
Working in his Emeryville, California, studio, Wall is still finding new ways to create. When the pandemic disrupted the supply chain of stainless steel, he started making small-scale color drawings, something he said he hadn’t focused on in seventy years. After decades of making steel forms appear weightless, he is finding new inspiration by returning to two dimensions.
“As an artist, you always feel that you should push the limits of what you’re doing,” Wall says. “You still want to know and see what’s possible. I love the risk. I love the idea of doing something, and I’m just going to the edge, and so what if it’s a total failure? You learn from that and move on.”
