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Albuquerque
Journal, Sunday, March 2 1980
Rarely are fervent
creators soft-spoken about their passions, but Chicago collagist Robert
Nickle is.
It's one thing for an
artist to ask his creation to speak for itself. Robert Nickle asks it to
not only speak for itself, but for him too.
Rarely does a single
work by a contemporary master wend its way to completion over several
decades. Nickle's collages sometimes take 20 to 30 years to complete,
and then are completed in the perfect moment of intuitive rightness.
Nickle is that rare
artist for whom the creative product is worth a lifetime. His rare
collages go on display Tuesday at the Hoshour Gallery, 417 Second Street
SW. The show by the Chicago artist most highly regarded for his
integrated vision and action continues through March 30 during regular
gallery hours noon to 5 pm Tuedays to Saturdays.
Nickle will travel to
New Mexico for the opening of this unusual exhibit of some works
completed between 1962 and 1979. A reception is scheduled from 5 to 8
p.m. Tuesday, marking a change from regular Sunday to regular Tuesday
openings at Hoshour.
Nickle, a professor of
design for 25 years at the University of Illinois in Chicago, has made a
living mostly by his designs, according to his statements, reserving his
art work as a personal meditation. Though he began showing at the
Richard Gray Gallery in Chicago in 1963, and since has been recognized
by the Art Institute of Chicago with a one-man exhibit, his art remains
purist and powerful.
The Nickle collages at
Hoshour, for me, are insistently hushed and are dramatic in their
silence. Earth colors predominate, though brighter colors sometimes find
their way into the works.
It must be understood
that Nickle is a collector and arranger of all things in his collages.
He doesn't paint pieces of paper, but he finds the appropriate papers
floating in the debris of the Windy City.
Nickle salvages
discarded ticket stubs and luggage labels about to return, rotting to
the earth; snatches children's drawings and scribbles being sucked into
Chicago cisterns, meditates on McDonald's translucent plastic drinking
cup lids and wrenches lost shoe heels from sidewalks. These are the
components of his collages. These elements are used like paints, however
and with little funkiness or teasing gymnastics sometimes found in
"found object" art.
The compositions they
become are solidly powerful, and sometimes magnificent in their
understatement. Nickle's concern with the perfect combination of items
within his often square (and sometimes rectangular or circular) formats
is best expressed in his gallery statement for a January 1980
exhibition: "That very thin line that separates right from wrong in a
work is as filled with wonder and fragileness as life itself. I search
out that line, moving as closely as possible to it as I work - sometimes
slowly and cautiously and at other times swiftly and recklessly...
Collage enables me to touch, test, lose and then touch again those
critical forces that surround the line. I hope that my work holds
particular value to those who, like myself, are searching for that
magically elusive threshold where nothingness unpredictably becomes
everythingness." |