August 25 - October 16, 2023 Important Works

This year Paul Dibble has made two new large geometric figures, part of a consistent genre in the sculptor’s oeuvre, spanning a twenty five-year period. The figures come on the heels of the COVID years and it isn’t hard to see in their stance some of the feelings that these times have produced, a sort of self containment in a world that has seemed frozen and foreign, the figures isolated and alone. The characteristic reduction of the human form in the geometric studies, has the arms and limbs redefined as simple geometric shapes – the legs turning into cones, the heads abbreviated to spheres – unexpectedly this gives them a nuanced and intense sense of gesture. And we see this here. In A Moment (2023), she looks dreamy, as if her mind is far away while Waiting for Time to Pass (2023) has a distinctly pensive atmosphere, the crossed arms here suggesting stiffened shoulders as if there is some endurance required in this business of standing. We don’t know what they wait for or of what they dream, but these are not narrations of stories, rather they express raw emotions - simply.