8th Sculpture 1965

Michael Bolus made this sculpture—which he simply called 8th Sculpture—from painted metal. He sliced his palette into flat shapes and simply set them down. I can imagine him considering how each shape catches the light, how the curve of one reflects off another. It’s like he’s asking, "How little can I do, and still make a something?" He just leans them together to form a composition. The pink one is my favorite. It looks like it could be a sock or a stocking, but then it's metal. It’s the kind of gesture you might see in the paintings of artists like Ellsworth Kelly or Carmen Herrera, who played with the tensions between hard-edged abstraction and organic form. We see the material qualities, which make this sculpture a painting in three-dimensional form. Bolus speaks to an ongoing conversation about form, color, and space. Artists riff off each other, creating call-and-response that enriches the language of art. It reminds me that uncertainty and ambiguity are not weaknesses, but opportunities for dialogue and discovery.