CORNELIA KUBLER KAVANAGH
Teaching herself to carve stone in the tradition of Moore, Hepworth and Arp at the age of 46, Kavanagh slowly transformed the principles of modernism into a style of her own. Characterized by rounded sensual shapes, Kavanagh’s sculptures highlight the synergy between what is removed and what remains to create intriguing visual harmonies with the interactions between light and shadow.
After gaining proficiency with stone carving tools and the confidence to manipulate pneumatic hand pieces and grinders in a controlled manner, Kavanagh gradually progressed from softer alabasters and steatites to Carrara marble. Following the sell-out success of her first New York show at Parish-Hadley in 1966, Kavanagh was advised by Albert Hadley to start making limited edition castings because stone was too difficult a medium to produce in volume and large scale.
As fate would have it, shortly thereafter, she experimented carving a broken polystyrene flotation billet that had washed up on the beach below her studio in Connecticut during a storm. This was her transformational discovery! Although she still occasionally carves stone, most of her diverse output is now produced from carved polystyrene, hard-coated, faired and finished to a high degree of refinement with automobile paint to ensure perfect castings in bronze, aluminum and stainless steel.
Kavanagh’s first large polystyrene carvings were plaster-coated sculptures of interpretations of words and themes found in the seminal treatise on art history called The Shape of Time: Remarks on the History of Things (Yale University Press, 1961). Written by her father, George Kubler, the book had a profound impact on the study of art, and is still in print, having been published in over 40 languages.
Again, as fate would have it, after her Shape of Time sculptures were posted on her website following an exhibition at the Kirshenbaum & Bond advertising agency in New York, they were noticed by a curator in Venice who eventually encouraged her to have them cast in bronze, and secure a grant from the US Virgin Islands Council on the Arts so they could be shown at the 51st La Biennale di Venezia in June, 2005. (The Virgin Islands sponsorship accrued from Kavanagh working out of a studio in St. Thomas where she and her husband maintained a winter residence.)
After the Biennale, Kavanagh joined the Blue Mountain Gallery in New York. Over the ensuing 12 years, she had four solo exhibitions there. The first, carved in response to the Indian Ocean tsunami of December 26, 2004, consisted of a dozen stylized tsunami waves. Exploring the paradox of water as sustainer of life and instrument of destruction, Kavanagh attempted to reconcile water’s capacity for devastation with its inherent fluid grace. As William Zimmer noted in his review of The Tsunami Project in SCULPTURE Magazine, “the exalting of something awful is a seeming contradiction that might be difficult to assimilate, but it’s the kind of singular tension that the highest art embraces.”
Her next Blue Mountain exhibition was called The Muse Project. Instead of specifically referencing the nine sister goddesses born to Zeus and Mnemosyne on Mount Olympus that Homer called “muses,” Kavanagh celebrated nine contemporary women artists whose lives and work have inspired her. The nine sculptures – in plaster, Aqua Resin® and bronze – were all rendered in the same stylized form, with individuality expressed solely by name, gesture and color. The exhibition was well received and moved to Miami’s Design district during Art Basel Miami Beach, in December, 2007, where five bronze castings were sold along with a life-size hard-coated polystyrene painted pomegranate red!
Her two subsequent solo exhibitions at Blue Mountain addressed global warming and C02 emissions. Artic Ice Melt: Moulins of my Mind featured a dozen ice moulin sculptures depicting the acceleration of meltwater through glacial ice due to global warming; whereas The Pteropod Project used pteropods, beautiful microscopic marine animals known as ‘sea butterflies’ at the bottom of the marine food web, as surrogates for the ravages of ocean acidification as the result of CO2 emissions. To make an impact with viewers, Kavanagh’s modernist depictions of pteropods, which are no larger than a grain of sand and invisible to the naked eye, were scaled up between 100 to 400 times!
Both exhibitions were picked up by major museums. Artic Ice Melt was featured at the American Museum of Natural History at a special Polar Weekend exhibition, February 7-8. 2009, and several of her ice moulin sculptures were displayed at the Peabody Essex museum in Salem, MA at a show called RIPPLE EFFECT: The Art of Water, June 18, 2011 through May, 2012. The Peabody Essex also displayed 2 of Kavanagh’s pteropod sculptures in Sizing It Up: Scale in Nature and Art, 2015-2016, while the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC, in collaboration with Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, created a special installation for 5 pteropod sculptures under the blue whale in the Sant Ocean Hall called FRAGILE BEAUTY: The Art & Science of Sea Butterflies. The exhibition ran from 2013 to 2016.
Kavanagh’s most recent museum exhibition, The ARTIST’S EYE: Figurines of the Paleolithic, at Yale’s Peabody Museum in New Haven, CT, August 11. 2018 to March 17, 2019, celebrated the so-called “Venus” figures created by Cro-Magnon hunters and gatherers between 40,000 and 15,000 BCE. Ranging in size from 1.4 to 8.9 inches, these are the first three-dimensional representations of the female form ever discovered. For the show, Kavanagh enlarged the figures by replicating them in bronze and polymer so their surface details could be readily perceived, and placed them in fantasy sea shells long associated in art historical contexts with birth and regeneration.
Currently, Kavanagh has been revisiting modernists who originally inspired her. Selections from her continuing Deconstructing the Oval series were shown at Graham Shay 1857, August 30 – September 30, 2023. Kavanagh’s recent AfterMoore series, while still being developed, references Henry Moore’s use of voids in reclining figures, and her latest Modernist Musings draw from Picasso. Lipchitz, Miro and others to generate pared down expressions of “essence” through stylized birds and female forms.
Kavanagh’s important installations include the Smilow Cancer Hospital at Yale-New Haven, Yale-New Haven Hospital, the Princeton Medical Center in Plainsboro, NJ, the Dwight-Englewood School in Englewood, NJ and the Lancaster Winery in Healdsburg, CA. To see the full range of her work, visit www.corneliakavanagh.com.