What you see is what you get in the Vero Beach Museum of Art’s current Titelman Gallery show “Larry Kagan: Object/Shadow.”
Mounted on the walls of the gallery, Kagan’s sculptures – playful abstract geometries of steel rod bent and welded into interconnecting shapes – are enjoyable as three-dimensional drawings in space.
If that were all they were, the artworks might appeal to only a few cognoscenti. Instead, the public at large is delighted by the shadow pictures the sculptures improbably cast onto the gallery’s white walls.
Lit from above, one tangle of steel yields a picture of a lively black poodle; another limns a man’s oxford shoe. Yet another outlines an F-16 fighter jet soaring skyward. There’s a basketball point guard caught in mid-dribble, a smoking gun, and a remarkably detailed mosquito. Works that pay homage to other artists include a rabbit after Albrecht Dürer, and a take-off on Keith Haring’s couple holding a valentine heart. And while everyone will recognize the familiar visage of Che Guevara, few will know that the famous image is based on Cuban photographer Alberto Korda’s portrait of the Marxist revolutionary.
In all, 15 works in the show will keep you guessing as to how Kagan does it.
Larry Kagan was born in 1946 in a displaced-persons camp in Allied-administered Germany. His parents were refugees from Belarus, a country that became part of the Soviet Union after World War II.
The effects of war were devastating to Kagan’s parents. “My dad’s side of the family got wiped out,” Kagan says.
His father, a survivor of a Siberian labor camp, and his mother, a member of the underground resistance in Belarus, met and escaped to the camp where Kagan was born. They later relocated to Israel. At 13, Kagan moved with his family to the U.S. and settled in the Bronx. Five years after that he was a student at the Rensselaer Polytechnic School in Troy, N.Y.
In childhood he’d dreamed of becoming an engineer, but the prerequisites for an engineering degree disabused him of that notion.
As Kagan tells it, “I was always making mistakes in my arithmetic, so I figured I better not build any bridges.”
He changed his major to English and, on a whim, took an etching class at the nearby University of Albany.
That class changed the course of his life. Two years later, with a master’s degree in printmaking from the University of Albany, he returned to New York City to embark on an artistic career.
That was in 1970. Kagan soon became “tired of walking around with acid stains on my fingernails and lots of ink on my fingers,” and began carving sculptures from chunks of Lucite acrylic. By the end of the decade he was working in steel, using scraps he found on the streets and elsewhere.
“I used to walk my dog in Tribeca in the days before it was Tribeca. And they used to dump all of this construction debris there,” he says.
The refuse included sheet metal, bits of expanded steel, short lengths of wire, and snippets of steel rod.
Ragged-edged, scarred and stained with oil and rust, the cast-offs attracted Kagan precisely for what he calls their “rich history.”
He decided that by welding his found objects together he could create three-dimensional “drawings” that were more compelling than anything he could draw with pencil or ink on paper.
But Kagan found that his freestanding sculptures – despite their materials’ rich history – disappeared amidst the visual noise of a painting-hung gallery. That’s when he resolved to mount his sculptures directly onto gallery walls, which in those days were invariably painted in spotless white.
Then he discovered that his “bunches of steel” cast shadows on the wall that distracted from the sculpture itself.
“So I had to figure out how to deal with the shadows, and eventually I decided to use them,” Kagan says.
Several pieces in the show, including “Beach Chair” and “Point Guard” from 2001 and “F-16,” made in 2003, are straightforward linear drawings.
Kagan says that as he got better at controlling the shadows, he was able to develop additional graphic techniques.
By 2005, he was creating solid shadows in works like “Poodle,” which presents the dog as a dark silhouette. In “Oxford” made six years later, Kagan combined solid areas of shadow with lit areas to create the illusion of a spit-polished man’s dress shoe.
Kagan also learned to manipulate the shadows’ densities, from dark and focused to light and diffused. That skill can be seen in “Rabbit,” where the animal’s sharp ears are contrasted with its softy rendered body.
Kagan’s explanation of how he does it doesn’t dilute the magic one bit.
He starts out by drawing the image he wants to create in shadow onto his studio wall. Then he determines the exact point at which the essential light fixture will be placed to produce the image.
“It’s really about the light source,” he says.
“I mean, this whole thing looks like it is about shadows, but it’s really sculpting light. You have this beam of light that’s coming off from a single point, and then you’re sort of playing around to see how you can cut into it.”
Welding together steel rods that will shape light into a portrait of George Washington, say, or a high-heel pump is a challenge, Kagan says.
“You are always working one dimension away from what you’re actually going to get.”
That doesn’t mean that the sculptures themselves look like an afterthought to the images they produce.
The shadows and the twisted metal rods that produce them have a visual relationship.
For instance, the shapes of the bent rods above the homage to Keith Haring can easily be read as a group of Haring’s famously featureless, dancing figures. A sculpture that casts the shadow of a foreshortened hand grasping a pistol doubles as the smoke coming from the gun’s barrel.
Kagan names one of his favorite sculptures in the show for the interaction it has with its shadow.
“I think the F-16 is really interesting – the steel almost looks like a shock wave,” he says.
When a museum visitor recently asked Kagan why his sculptural drawings don’t tackle heavyweight subject matter – themes concerning the human condition, the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat and so on – the artist mildly demurred.
“My work doesn’t express anything beyond the last ivory-billed woodpecker, or that kind of thing. In reality, to me, it means that I’m dealing on the level of perception,” Kagan says.
“Maybe it’s because I’ve always wanted to be an engineer.”
Larry Hagan: Object/Shadow continues through May 21.
