by Sandy Moore
Henry Klimowicz is a sculptor. When he started out he fashioned objects with tinfoil, wood, cardboard, wax and other materials, but about 1986 he settled on cardboard as his "adult art medium". He is drawn to the ubiquity and humbleness of cardboard. Most of us ignore cardboard--it's trash. Through Klimowicz's hands, everyday cardboard transcends its way into the sublime.
When I met Henry at the MacDowell Colony in 1986 he was sculpting diorama-like pieces out of cut and folded cardboard-- 2 mice exploring the world, a moose in a landscape, a man standing on the much larger chest of a woman. Many of these were painted in colors, and expressed a personal mythology based on awe. He also made an indoor loft bed planted with real grass, that a viewer could lie down on.
In the mid 1990's, shortly after Henry moved upstate, he went quiet and did not make art for about 7 years. He had a new child, a farm, responsibilities. When he re-surfaced, he no longer used color, and no longer sculpted figures. The work leaned toward the abstract. There was one continuity--Henry stayed true to corrugated cardboard. His tools are, consistently: glue, glue gun, box cutter.
How does he make these pieces? Each piece starts with a kernel of an idea and builds on itself--a process of accretion much like a paper-wasp nest, or a shell. For example, his Liken Lichen pieces start as a moebius-like strip that spirals inside, reverses itself, and continues to fills in and grow outside. I asked Henry to point out the "start point" for his Liken Lichens-- and we stuck our heads as deep as we could into these sculptures without being able to discern a start point. So perhaps the endpoint is not known at the onset, and visa versa. His "method for proceeding" builds on the immediate prior pieces, and is consistently repetitive, sometimes to the point of boredom (he listens to audiobooks while he works). At the same time though, the result is always different. He does not foresee what the outcome will be when he starts. He presumes that a wasp making a paper nest, or a bee assembling the hexagons of its hive doesn't foresee or hold in its "mind" what will develop. But since we cannot know the mind of an insect, the insect becomes a metaphor, "a thing regarded as representative...of something else, especially something abstract." Klimowicz strives to turn off his mind from the work as it "grows". He doesn't want to get in the way of the piece. He recognizes that the unconscious is at play in the repetition, in a space free from conscious theorems.
Are these works abstract? Klimowicz's titles--Circle, Rectangle #8-- are highly specific and at first seem abstract. But moving throughout these sculptures are references to figures and movement--eddies, intersecting ripples in a pond, sperm, the wild incomprehensible (but recognizable) details of nature. In his recent show at the Garrison Art Center (9/21--11/10), several sculptures raise questions of the spiritual--there are lacy sculptures hanging in the windows which transform the incoming light from morning until evening, like trees in the stillness of the woods. There is a central tall piece which manages to be static and dynamic at the same time, evoking a shamanic African dancer.
There is a spiritual quality in the work--but animism, not theism. Henry tries to create with the humility of an insect, or a craftsperson like a quilter. Klimowicz's philosophy is his technique. And visa versa.
Window sculptures, Garrison Art Center
Liken Lichen
Rectangle #8