The Keeper | Chuck Webster
The Keeper, 2020
Bronze
Edition of 5
14 x 18 x 3 1/2 inches
$4,000
The Keeper, 2020
Bronze
Edition of 5
14 x 18 x 3 1/2 inches
$4,000
The Keeper, 2020
Bronze
Edition of 5
14 x 18 x 3 1/2 inches
$4,000
Bone of man and beast, cornstalk and leaf.
– T.S. Eliot, “East Coker”, from The Four Quartets
Every adventure requires a first step. – Cheshire Cat
Planthouse is pleased to announce The Keeper by Chuck Webster. Fabricated by Excalibur in Brooklyn, this is his first edition in bronze.
In his first body of work in sculpture, Webster is interested in how a small object can project monumental scale and history and how it can create a narrative, both as an actor in a story and as a place for an audience to be. Like poetry, the sculptures create a story, a place and a sense of scale out of form.
Webster makes these sculptures out of scraps of wood and old croquet mallets, which he has collected for years. They are made, taken apart, reassembled and painted with encaustic, which gives them a new, more ambiguous meaning. His process in sculpture comes directly out his painting process, where dozens of pieces are worked on simultaneously, combined, destroyed and brought together again. The work nurtures its own continuity through touch and thought.
The Keeper sits in a monumental tradition of sculpture. Like Rodin’s rough-hewn figures, its bronze contours are responsive to the hand, and it has the scale and weight of a Roman relic. It captures the viewer in its own fable.
Born in Binghamton, NY, Chuck Webster received a B.A. from Oberlin College in 1992 and an MFA from American University in 1996. The artist’s work can be seen in numerous public collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, MD; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX; the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; and The Archives of the Rothko Chapel in Houston.
In 2012, the critic Roberta Smith wrote in a New York Times review that his paintings “are also very much, if not startlingly, little big paintings: they have a strange, irrepressible scale, a largeness that exceeds their size and creates a distinctive, slightly comedic sense of intimacy … each painting is very much its own pictorial being: vulnerable, rambunctious and fully inhabited.”
He has been the recipient of numerous awards and grants, including the 2018 National Academy Affiliated Fellow at the American Academy in Rome, The Milton Avery Fellowship at Yaddo, 2010 and 2000; the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 2016; the MacDowell Fellowship, Peterborough, NH, 2004 and 2017; and the Winter Fellowship at the Fine Art Works Center in Provincetown MA, 2004. Webster lives and works in New York City.