Finding the Center:
Ron Mehlman at Chesterwood
May 27 - October 23, 2023

The annual contemporary sculpture at Chesterwood exhibition is generously supported by the Lillian Heller Sculpture Endowment.

IN 1987, I encountered Ron Mehlman’s WATER TRILOGY,

which had just been installed in a midtown Manhattan plaza.  I was struck by how Mehlman successfully wedded granite and glass with light and water to create a sculpture that was both timeless and fleeting.  Especially at night, when its center is illuminated from behind, the glass became a cascade of liquid light, a meditative focal point.

Now, over three decades later, it is a great privilege to bring Mehlman’s work to Chesterwood, where sculptural tradition, innovation, and nature converge. Chesterwood offers a unique venue in which to view Mehlman’s sculptures. Here pieces can be appreciated in relation to the beauty of the Berkshire landscape, with its changing vistas and atmospheric light.  Nurtured by the same landscape, Daniel Chester French created the models for some of his most memorable works, cast in bronze or carved in marble by skilled artisans.

Finding the Center features Mehlman’s sculptures from the 1980s to the present and chronicles his growth over four decades. Most of the works date to the 80s and 90s, shortly after Mehlman began his long association with Pietrasanta, Italy in 1979.  In observing the arc of his development, one can see how a kernel of an idea emerges and then gets reintegrated into a new idea that morphs into another iteration.

Mehlman works with traditional materials in untraditional ways. He combines marble, onyx, granite, glass, metal, and wood.  He stacks, carves, and balances metamorphic rock, using wedges and shaped pieces like building blocks.  He cracks open stone and exuberantly adds color, treating mineral slabs like painted canvases, often rendering the stone translucent. Light and space are essential sculptural components. His proximity to Pietrasanta provides him with access to not just white Carrara marble but to brilliantly hued stones shipped from all over the world. There he has the raw materials and skilled labor to forge a sculptural practice in conversation with the ancients but born of modernism. Sculpture in its physicality is closely tied to place, both where it is made and displayed. Finding the Center: Ron Mehlman at Chesterwood brings Italy to the Berkshires and Mehlman’s unconventional sculptures into dialogue with the classical legacy of Daniel Chester French.

- Michele Cohen, Ph.D., Guest Curator