The Brute Classicism of Joel Perlman

Partial gallery view, Joel Perlman at Loretta Howard Gallery (all photographs by the author for Hyperallergic)

It’s been over twenty years since we’ve seen Joel Perlman’s large-scale sculptures on exhibition in New York City. The size and weight of his mighty works in welded steel can be a challenge to show, but Loretta Howard Gallery has pulled out all the stops with its current exhibition, bringing in five new large-scale works (four in welded steel and one in aluminum). The show also includes a small work in weathered steel, a hanging cast bronze, and a wall-mounted work in aluminum.

For much of the last forty years, Perlman has been creating towering sentinels in steel. His process has remained relatively unchanged since the very beginning: snapping huge industrial-grade planes of steel together with bold welds using a torch and his bare hands. Perlman is a stand-alone original preceded by Anthony Caro and David Smith.

Contemporary sculpture today can be defined by two extremes. One rooted in multiple points of reference as in the work of Paul McCarthy, which employs a mixed use of materials and crosses mediums where even the exhibition space can be appropriated as part of the ‘medium.’ The other rooted in singularity like the work of Richard Serra, whose massive large-scale works are specific to a direct exchange with the artwork. The first accentuates the artist’s strategy as a retort or response to an external societal change in the world. The second articulates the ambition of the individual through an attention to trueness in form and materials. The work of Joel Perlman belongs to the latter.

Perlman learned to weld alongside mechanics, farmers and trucker drivers at a night class offered at Ames Welding in downtown Ithaca while he was an undergraduate at Cornell University in the early 1960s. Welding was like “magic,” Perlman recalls, “You touch a rod to metal, there’s a flash and buzz, and two pieces become one.”