Evanston Art Center, Evanston, Il. in Spring 2010

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Ivy Cooper, St. Louis Beacon

December 16, 2010

“Infrastructure” at Good Citizen Gallery features four new works by Arny Nadler, associate professor of art at Washington University, that continue the artist's use of basic building materials — here, concrete and rebar — as expressive sculptural media. “Cast Study 1” and “Cast Study 2” are twisting, slouching concrete columns that appear bursting with pent-up energy; they bring to mind Michelangelo's marble Slaves, struggling to free themselves from the stubborn physicality of their own medium. The surface of Nadler’s works are animated too, echoing the taught sheets of plastic that once contained them, or gouged to reveal the concrete's crusty tactility. “Rebar Study 1” and “Rebar Study 2” are arcing, wavelike forms made of strands of welded rebar. Never has this brute construction material looked so sinewy and weightless. The latter works relate to a larger rebar piece, “Grosse Point Confluence,” that the artist recently produced for the Evanston Art Center in Illinois, but their smaller scale affords a more intimate experience of their improbable grace.

Jessica Baran, River Front Times

December 16, 2010

Infrastructure Reversing the everyday use of rebar, local sculptor Arny Nadler exposes the ribbed steel to exploit its formal potential. Strands of the metal are joined side by side and shaped into undulating, wave-like forms, producing work that is at once delicate, porous and weightily proletarian. Accompanying the Rebar Studies are upright, totemic sculptures made of concrete, beneath the surface of which rebar writhes and occasionally protrudes with stitch-like ridges. These works appear like cloaked figures, the surface texture of the concrete revealing all the imprints of plastic coverings and other molding devices, producing the vague appearance of wrinkled and lacerated skin. While these roughly elegant works proclaim a determined formalist agenda, they — like Nadler's other evocative sculpture series, Beacons — suggest strong narrative associations, from the bound body and oceanic waves to the decline of industry and disappearance of cottage-craft expertise.

Ivy Cooper, St. Louis Beacon

April 27, 2009

Arny Nadler is one of St. Louis' finest sculptors, though his local shows tend to be few and far between. Late last year we had the pleasure of seeing "Beacons" at Phil Slein Gallery, an exhibition of Nadler's monumental, brooding monoliths that signaled a different direction for the artist. The current show at the Center of Creative Arts' Millstone Gallery is a welcome follow-up to "Beacons," with smaller scale studies of those larger works, plus sculptural "sketches" in black-painted steel re-bar, and "Pre-Cast" (2009), a larger re-bar work in COCA's outdoor courtyard. Nadler can somehow turn the lowliest of construction material -- painted steel, bumpy re-bar -- into meditative sentinels. The forms are powerful and yet they possess a certain fragility, as if there were a chink in their armor that might take them down any second. The surprise at this show is that this rare quality comes off even in the models, proving that Nadler doesn't have to work big to think big.

from The Twenty-First Rosen Outdoor Sculpture Competition and Exhibition 2007-2008

“Arny Nadler’s duo, Wintering stands majestically at the top of a hill wherein the Blue Ridge Mountains create a setting perfect for his presentation. Two large-scaled, painted steel vessels referencing the utilitarian become architectural. The pair resonates as enormous artifacts, resolved, preserved, and imposing in such an elaborated scale. Meticulously crafted from hundreds of steel plates welded together, Wintering takes on several other attributes; it appears to be a woven basket, cast pottery, or fired porcelain. Nadler’s deliberate quoting of other processes that are more delicate combined with reference to the domestic (vessel, urn, and vase) is an elegant portrayal, despite a stark surface, darkness, and monumentality. That the artist titled the work Wintering is significant, as it implies physical action as opposed to a still object. This attaches a psychological complexity and inquiry into the foreboding that is articulated through objects and their emotional signifiers. In a mysterious splendor, Wintering functions as a massive aesthetic entity, while also capturing the character of psychological space through our knowledge of objects and their referents.”

Shannon Fitzgerald
Exhibition Juror
Independent Write & Curator, St. Louis, MO