John Newman has invented a sculptural language all his own. Neither exactly representational nor wholly abstract, his sculptures marry organic and geometric grammars, and provide access to what Duchamp called the fourth dimension – a space defined by speculation. His work encourages us to look beyond what we think we know, and to revel in what is out there. Born in Flushing, New York, in 1952, Newman came of age as a sculptor in the late ’70s and early ’80s. A student of minimalism, he slipped its bounds by delving into quantum mechanics and non-Euclidean geometry – finding metaphors and mysteries of the invisible in the one, and structural echoes of medieval armor and dinosaur skeletons in the other. His early works were fabricated and cast out of aluminum, bronze, iron and steel, and hung off the wall or settled on the floor, their scale approaching, if not exceeding, that of the human body. Full of complex curving shapes, they were intriguing hybrids, descended as much from plant or animal life as from mechanical devices.
