When confronted with a body of work by a single artist stretching over many years, the viewer will, sooner or later, start looking for recurring motifs and themes, for the traits that bind together the oeuvre. There are many reasons why we respond in this way (including a hunger for predictability in an unpredictable world), but chief among them is the notion, fostered by generations of art historians, that every accomplished artist achieves a recognizable style which can be seen running throughout his or her work.
Among the many pleasures of Norman Hoberman’s art is the way in which he has repeatedly challenged this notion of stylistic consistency throughout his artistic career, which now extends some five decades. Now, of course there are major artists who have deliberately changed their styles, sometimes even more than once (Picabia and Guston are two examples that come immediately to mind) to keep their imaginations lively and to escape the dangers of formulaic production. The many shifts in Hoberman’s work—shifts that involve changing mediums (sculpture to painting and back), modes (Cubist-derived structures give way to geometric abstractions, to be followed by biomorphic forms and realist figuration) and techniques (modeled concrete, ceramics, painted wood, wire mesh forms, computer-controlled wood carving)—are not the result of any strategic decision to change his established style, nor are they simply responses to changing artistic fashions, although Hoberman has by no means been indifferent to the evolution of postwar art.
Hoberman’s earliest works are a series of abstract sculptures executed in concrete between 1959 and 1964. Assembled from curvilinear units with considerable formal variety within each sculpture, these works build on the achievement of Abstract Expressionist sculpture, in particular the work of David Smith. But they also depart from Smith in materials and technique. While most abstract sculpture of the 1950s relied on welded steel and cast bronze, Hoberman turned to a material that had hardly ever been used in fine art: concrete. Clearly his training in architecture informed his choice of this material, as did his sojourn in Rome in the late 1950s. There he discovered the work of Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi (1891-1979), whose use of reinforced concrete to create shell-like structures got Hoberman thinking about the sculptural possibilities of concrete.
The paintings that followed seem, at first glance, worlds away from the concrete sculptures. Not only is the medium different, but the irregular gray shapes of the sculptures (at times reminiscent of the segmented bathers in Picasso’s Surrealist-influenced late 1920s paintings) have given way to hard-edge, brightly colored forms fit together in tightly interlocked compositions. The hand, so present in the sculptures, seems to have been banished as Hoberman embraces the bold, streamlined graphics that pervaded the 1960s, in painting and in the larger society. Yet a closer look at these paintings reveals that, like the sculptures, they are made up of distinctly individual units that often are poised between the curvilinear and the rectilinear, and, indeed, some of the paintings are shaped and three-dimensional.
The importance of the individual compositional unit is made explicit in a later series of polychrome wood wall reliefs of the early 1990s. Looking at them, it’s almost as if he has dismantled one of his abstract paintings and rendered each element in three dimensions. On the move as ever, Hoberman now forsakes straight lines for a profusion of blobby and splatterlike shapes that strongly recall the forms of Matisse’s late cutouts. But his innovative spirit goes much further: the wooden shapes are cut so that they fit together like jigsaw puzzles, displaying Hoberman’s formal ingenuity and great visual wit. Several of the reliefs incorporate pegs on which the colored wood elements hang, a novel means of emphasizing the sculptural weight of the works and introducing the possibility of interactivity:
In 1982, in the wake of a trip to China where he was impressed with some early Neolithic vessels, Hoberman immersed himself in ceramics, eventually building a large kiln so that he could fire his ambitious pieces. The resulting sculptures are the most biomorphic and unabashedly erotic of Hoberman’s career. Bristling with phallic and breastlike protuberances, they can seem like artifacts from some newly discovered prehistoric fertility cult. Some of them have been outfitted with electric lights. It’s a tribute to Hoberman’s feeling for forms that the tubular electric bulbs combine perfectly with the archaic-looking ceramic structures. Other of the ceramic pieces come across as comic tributes to the bulbous forms in Picasso’s famous head of a woman done at Boisgeloup in the 1930s.
The figural associations of the ceramics are made explicit in Hoberman’s wire-mesh sculptures of the mid 1990s. Life-size, though with a presence that feels larger than that, these figures are nearly all males. The bodies are rendered with great realism: the layered mesh smoothly modulates to sketch out muscles, skeletal structure, genitals and the odd bit of flab. Despite the stiffness of the material, Hoberman succeeds in creating convincingly lifelike bodies, bent into unusual postures. Although these figures contain echoes of classical statuary, as well as of Hoberman’s contemporary George Segal, the use of wire mesh strongly evokes the wireframe modeling used in 3D computer graphics. This seems to presage the artist’s more recent involvement with digital technology.
Perhaps the most obviously architectural of Hoberman’s sculptures are his segmented wood pieces (2004-2007) and “stick assembly” sculptures (1998-2000). (Here a word must be said about the most sculptural of Hoberman’s architectural projects: his 1960 design for a memorial to Franklin Delano Roosevelt: intended to be sited on the Mall in Washington, it features a loose circle of giant upright slabs to be engraved with FDR’s speeches in a kind of minimalist Stonehenge. After winning an internationa competition, the design met with opposition from the Roosevelt family and from Congress, which killed the project.) Both the segmented wood pieces and the “stick assemblies” rely on modularity. In the latter, countless thin wood struts are joined together (with wooden dowels) into wildly proliferating structures that can suggest towers, bridges, crystal formations and games of pick-up sticks. Color plays an important part by establishing retinal structures within the wooden armatures; abstract shapes seem to emerge from the sculptures. These works have something of the mathematical iterations of Sol LeWitt and the jazzy energy of Mondrian’s New York paintings, but also a hint of Piranesian entropy. (These engagingly cumulative openwork sculptures also invite comparison with the adaptive structures of Hoberman’s son, designer Chuck Hoberman; there’s an interesting father-son exhibition waiting to be done here.)
The segmented wood sculptures employ polygonal pieces of wood whose edges have been cut so that when joined end to end they create spiraling forms or gradually curving uprights. The sculptures are mostly freestanding and can be oriented in many different ways; they have no fixed up and down. Polychromatic as well as polygonal, they epitomize the playful blend of visual invention and scientific speculation that underlies much of Hoberman’s recent work. They also continue his practice of drawing inspiration from techniques and materials associated with functionality—in this case woodworking. Hoberman excels at adapting traditional craft techniques to create strikingly new forms, an approach he shares with Martin Puryear, among other contemporary artists.
The machined heads that Hoberman is currently engaged with are the result of years of research and experiment with digital technology. Adapting 3D imaging systems such as those used for CAD modeling, and linking them to a computer-driven wood router, Hoberman has developed a process for translating digital images into portrait busts carved from wood. There’s something wonderfully incongruous in harnessing advanced technology to explore as ancient a mode as the carved-wood bust. As well as presenting physically arresting visages, often of people close to him, Hoberman’s computer assisted heads remind us of the ultimate continuity of human technology. Just as Hoberman refuses to limited by the old (and never really convincing) figurative/abstract dichotomy, so too does he reject the high technology/low technology divide. It is precisely this unprejudiced approach to art-making, joined to a boundless curiosity about how far he can push a particular material or technique, that has made possible the many shifts which have marked Hoberman’s work for some five decades. His work is a welcome reminder that the best art of a period must transcend notions of style, and that the best artists are those willing to meet the freedom that awaits them around each new corner.
— Raphael Rubinstein