Alfen’s Abstractions, Figures At Housatonic Museum Of Art

BRIDGEPORT — The Housatonic Museum of Art will present an installation by Norwalk-based artist Matthias Alfen of sculptures recently completed at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey as well as small survey show of his early works. The exhibitions will be presented December 8 to February 21. An opening reception will be held on Friday, December 8, from 7:30 to 10 pm, and the public is invited.

Mr Alfen began his career, in the late 80s, making insular, solid, geometrical sculptures, usually based on the cube. These works were explicitly monumental and massive, giving them a certain inner power, and can be read as strictly formal constructions. Geometrical intelligibility is transcendental, universal and unchanging; the memorial and sacramental functions of geometry — Mr Alfen’s stele and cross — confirms its innate sacredness, and are credible only because of that sacredness.

But unexpectedly, as though making a break with his own past as well as the modernist past of geometrical abstraction, Mr Alfen began making very human figures. Mr Alfen now uses softer materials — clay, plaster, polymer, wood — although a few sculptures are in bronze, like several of the geometrical sculptures. Virtually all of the figures are naked, some twisted and self-contradictory.

Matthias Alfen’s new series of “Janus” figures are an innovation in figural art predicated on the advances made by the Futurist sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni. Whereas Mr Boccioni celebrated technology and speed, Mr Alfen’s installation is an apocalyptic vision of a future where the Utopian dream of progress has produced dangerous side effects such as greenhouses gases, toxic waste, global warming and weapons of mass destruction.

Tragic irony is explicit in Alfen’s “Fossilmenschen” series, 2002-03, his most expressively daring works to date. The artist seems to be suggesting that human beings will become extinct, victims of their own uncontrollable violence and brutality; signaled by the display of teeth in several mouths, opened wide as if in a scream but also, ambiguously, in anger and rage.

The museum’s Burt Chernow Galleries are open Monday through Friday from 8:30 am until 5:30 pm (Thursday until 7 pm),  Saturday from 9 am to 3 pm, and Sunday noon until 4 pm.

The museum is at 900 Lafayette Boulevard. For more information, call 203-332-5052.