Harry Abend: The Supreme Achievement of the Essential

The selection of thirteen sculptures and their preparatory drawings by Harry Abend from the series Basic Forms (1965-1967) and the photographs taken by Barbara Brandli is a restaging of a previous scenario. This body of work is testimony of the ability of an artwork to persist, to demonstrate consistency and fidelity to itself despite the passing of time and the changing of aesthetic relationships and contexts. Abend’s works accept their chronological placement, their technical specifications and their distinct details of identification; however, they all strive towards an objective and widespread understanding. They maintain a unity despite diversity and, in the same way, they affirm their differences without allowing disintegration. This is because the works within the series can coexist due to singular plastic arrangement and a similar aesthetic model.

This notable aesthetic grouping reveals itself through a masterly command of geometric languages that propel interactive games of angles but with an overall sense of stability. The orthogonal, in the case of these sculptures, and the sensitivity, in the case of the preparatory drawings, far from distancing themselves with antithetical opinions , come closer to a registry of shared concerns. The consolidation of these resolutive guidelines inscribes itself in the model of a condensed geometric language. To this effect, from the parallelepiped, the cube, the cylinder and the sphere, the artist promotes declarations of plastic pluralities. There is no doubt that Harry Abend displaces his multiple investigations within the interiority of a single abstract-geometric conviction and from an origin of unity, simplicity and synthesis.

By concentrating on the series Basic Forms it must be asserted that, apart from its sculptural and plastic value, it retains a salient historical element. These thirteen works were to be featured in the 1967 Biennial of Sao Paulo, along with works from other Venezuelan artists Carlos Cruz-Diez and Mario Abreu. However, fate intervened and all the crates containing the individual works disappeared for several months. When the crates were found in Tokyo, they were at last brought to Brazil and exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro in 1968. Now, 46 years later, the entire series, in its small format  and embodiment of a strange and tense stillness, will be shown in New York City for the first time. 

The name given to the series alludes to the artist’s intention of extracting primeval geometric elements. The formal alphabet is reduced to simple forms that sharpen sensitivity and perception and direct visual impact. They are forms that are charged with the permanent renewal of their particular singularities. It is to say, simple forms reach their maximum potential due to their own simplicity. They possess self-affirmation without any temptation to renounce what they are, but they also allow for the possibility to expand themselves much farther beyond the place that contains and surrounds them. They seem, in this sense, to absorb the words of Martin Heidegger, “A boundary is not that at which something stops, a boundary is that from which something begins its presencing.”

The interaction of form, line, space and perspective is evident in works such as Tunken and Lagna. These formal effects are reduced even more in the works Doble Yo II and Doble Yo III, in which the prevailing supported horizontal elements are influenced by an upholding of a minimalism with mystical connotations. Here we must refer to the idea with which our approach culminates: the coherence that characterizes the oeuvre of Harry Abend. It is revealing to notice how in his works, and in those made later in different dimensions and series, pervades a deep-rooted sentiment of continuity and unity despite utilization of dissimilar media (molten bronze and aluminum, carved wood, and charcoal drawings on paper). This is due to the artist’s extraordinary mastery of essential forms and structures and his understanding of their spatial definitions. He demonstrates that authentic art always precedes the creation of new relationships and the renovated synthesis of these relationships’ own elements. Its distinctive quality has been, surely, that of Abend’s undertaking of Brancusi’s declaration: “One achieves simplicity despite oneself by entering into the real sense of things.”

Víctor Guédez