Tipping the Balance:
Contemporary Sculpture by John Van Alstine
July 9 - October 25, 2021

“Tipping the Balance” at Chesterwood 2021 (4 minutes): Video by Luc Billon

For nearly fifty years John Van Alstine’s restless inquisitiveness has generated a monumental body of work that explores elemental questions in art and life.  His abstract sculptures forged out of steel and stone are a complex synergy between natural forces and man-made materials. Balancing acts of stone and steel, Van Alstine’s outdoor sculptures’ swooping angular lines gesture expansively belying the weight of their steel and stone parts and underscoring the kinetic energies inherent within them.

Van Alstine transforms his artistic vocabulary of stone, found industrial artifacts and steel through intellectualized filters. The artist draws on ancient mythology, celestial navigation, tools, human figures, urban forms and industrial shards to give meanings to his visions.  Van Alstine’s sculpture is also informed by 20th century art and ideas gleaned from abstraction, constructivism, Eastern art and philosophy, assemblage and aspects of cubism and collage. Motion, balance and inertia vie with the eternal forces of gravity, tension and erosion; intimated associations and symbolism animate the finished constructs.

My sculpture operates on many levels and is open to a variety of interpretations. I believe its power is generated by the juxtaposition of impure found objects, layers of association, symbolism and narrative.

Born in upstate New York in 1952, John Van Alstine grew up in the southern Adirondacks. After attending St. Lawrence University, Kent State University (BFA 1974) and Cornell University (MFA 1976) he joined the faculty at the University of Wyoming, Laramie and later the University of Maryland, College Park to teach drawing and sculpture. In 1986 he left teaching and moved to the New York City area to pursue studio work full time. In 1987 he purchased a 19th century lumberyard on the banks of the Sacandaga River in the hamlet of Wells, New York and returned to the Adirondacks where he now lives and works in the restored historic structure which he transformed into his studio, gallery, sculpture park and residence.

Van Alstine is an American original whose art is known nationally and internationally. Widely exhibited, Van Alstine’s work is found from Beijing, China to public and private collections across America and around the world; they are published in John Van Alstine Sculpture (2018) among many other books and catalogues. Major museums like the Carnegie Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American Art, the Phillips Collection, the Albany Institute of History and Art, the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Grounds for Sculpture to name but a few have his work in their permanent collections.

Tipping the Balance: Contemporary Sculpture by John Van Alstine, an exhibit of the artist’s large outdoor sculpture was on view from July 10 through October 25, 2021.