Sky Cathedral's Presence I

Related to the artist’s Sky Cathedral, 1958 (in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York), Louise Nevelson’s Sky Cathedral's Presence I exudes the same sense of power and delicacy as its now iconic predecessor. Despite its monumental size (standing nearly 9 feet tall), the work retains a distinctly human scale, a result of the intricacy and sophistication imbued in the work by the artist. Here, Nevelson has arranged a series of shallow, open boxes constructed from salvaged wood; moldings, dowels, spindles, chair parts, architectural ornaments, and scroll-sawed fragments are all included here in a symphony of elegant and majestic forms. Nevelson turns this material into an imposing sculpture playing with a sense of flatness and recession, straight lines and curves, overlaps and vacancies, that has been likened to the faceting of Cubism and resulting in an absorbing visual complexity.