lapidary abstractions

i first read about hilary harnischfeger's work in a review without a photo in the new yorker. i loved the description so much and it was exciting to find images of the work online after imagining what they looked like... i would really love to see them in person! they are an interesting combination of painting and sculpture, and the palette is lovely.

"When Robert Smithson wrote his essay “The Crystal Land,” in 1966, he might have been cataloguing the qualities of Harnischfeger’s irresistible wall reliefs: “Fragmentation, corrosion, decomposition, disintegration, rock creep debris, slides, mud flow, avalanche were everywhere in evidence.” Lapidary abstractions roughly the size and shape of Byzantine icons—and the colors of twilight and dawn—are fashioned from paper, plaster, and ink and embedded with minerals (pyrite, green calcite, turquoise, rose quartz). Their intricate, stratified surfaces look less like handmade objects than like chimerical core samples—prized possessions in a twenty-first-century Wunderkammer."

-The New Yorker, June 2009

"Astrid," 2009, paper, plaster, ink, glass, and chalcedony, 16 1/2" x 13"

"Untitled," 2009, turquoise, paper, ink, plaster, 13" x 10" x 2 1/2"

"Formspiel," 2010, plaster, ink, paper, crushed glass, 20 1/2" x 22" x 4"

"Portrait," 2010, paper, plaster, ink, chalcedony, smithsonite, crushed glass, 16 1/2" x 18 1/2" x 4"

"Patternist 3," 2010, paper, plaster, ink, apophyllite, mica, crushed glass, 26 1/2 x 32 1/2 x 4"

detail: "Patternist 3"

more images: http://www.racheluffnergallery.com/artists/hilary-harnischfeger