By Lucy Lazarony
At the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County, the walls of the main gallery have gone white.
Not a single piece of two-dimensional art is on display.
Instead, the focus is on the three-dimensional art of acclaimed sculptors and Palm Beach county residents Alexander Krivosheiw, G.E. Olsen and Jeff Whyman.
Krivosheiw expresses himself through hand-forged bronze and aluminum.
Olsen works in marble, which he personally chooses from quarries in the United States and Europe, to create free form works as well as his signature bears.
And Whyman, who also is a painter and ceramic artist, creates large, playful figures using steel.
“I chose these three artists because they work in different materials,” says Nichole M. Hickey, manager of artist services at the Cultural Council. And with Whyman in the south in Delray, Krivosheiw in more central West Palm Beach and Olsen in Jupiter, the art in this exhibit spans the county.
Hickey describes Krivosheiw’s art in bronze and aluminum as “lyrical” and “very fluid” and calls the artist himself “a rising star.”
“G.E. Olsen works in marble and he said to me (that) he turns out 1 to 3 pieces a week, which I think is phenomenal,” Hickey says. “Jeff Whyman is an Artists Alley artist and I just love the raw beauty of (his work), how he takes the raw material and basically has it dance in front of you.”
The 29-piece exhibition, which is titled “Sculpture Selections from the Studio,” is on display until May 2.
For the past year and half, Krivosheiw, whose studio is in West Palm Beach, has been focused on a new body of work in bronze based on the abstraction of a woman falling in love.
“Each individual sculpture is a dream of falling in love,” Krivosheiw says.
In one, a woman tilts her head back for a First Kiss; in Le Rêve she falls into a dream of love; and in Amour she wakes out of the dream, Krivosheiw explains. “It’s my own language,” he says. “That’s the beauty of art and artists. You’re trying to communicate an idea in a language that people are unfamiliar with.”
The full expression of a woman in love is on display in Moore’s Canova. And if you look closely you can see the inspiration for the smaller works within the larger, abstracted piece.
The largest piece in the exhibition is a surrealistic, aluminum piece by Krivosheiw called Calliope.
“It’s 12 feet tall and it’s painted very similar to an automotive car. And it was based on a commission I did for a woman who was an ice skater,” Krivosheiw says. “It’s kind of a crossbreed of a hummingbird and an ice skater.”
The selection of sculptures from Jupiter-based G.E. Olsen includes a torso of a woman, and free-form abstract sculptures such as Moon Flower, created with marble from Portugal, Turkey and North Carolina.
“My interest is in the form, not so much the details,” Olsen says. Sometimes, it turns out recognizable. Other times, it’s purely abstract.”
The exhibition also includes four of Olsen’s popular and playful bear sculptures.
“There’s so many expressions you can do with them and not get into the details,” Olsen says. “You can look at (the) bears and see they don’t have eyes, they don’t have mouths, they don’t have claws. But you know they are bears without all that.”
Olsen has a 5-acre sculpture garden in Jupiter featuring more than 50 pieces of art as well as a small gallery with more intimate sculptures. (He welcomes visitors and can be reached at (561) 744-5565.)
Whyman, whose studio is in Artists Alley in Delray Beach, hails from St. Louis, and his earliest inspiration for working in steel comes from his childhood.
“As a young child, I was in awe watching the Arch being built. My dad would take me down there and I would watch the iron workers and builders,” Whyman remembers. He loved the smells and sounds and seeing such a huge undertaking in metal took hold of his imagination.
As an artist, Whyman likes the “bold, intensive, hardness” of working in steel but he also finds it “very spontaneous and fluid.”
“The plasticity of steel is important to me, almost feeling clay-like,” Whyman explains. Through his steel sculptures of cheerful and whimsical figures, Whyman aims to celebrate the joy, love and innocence of life.
“The goal is to create a quiet beauty in the form of innocence and gentle peace so it does feel like the sunlight coming up on the water or the birds singing in the morning,” Whyman says.
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Gallery hours at the Cultural Council of Palm Beach County are from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and admission is free. Alexander Krivosheiw will be speaking on April 14. Both lectures begin at 3 p.m. To reserve a spot at the lecture, please call (561) 472-3336.
More steel sculptures and a series of ceramic teapots by Whyman are on display at the RC2 Gallery at the Rosenbaum Art Gallery in Boca Raton through April 11. Additional sculptures by Krivosheiw can be viewed in the Baker Sponder Gallery at the Boca Raton Resort.