Five hundred words — my present limit — is criminally thrifty when it comes to evaluating the work of Allan Wexler. The artist is 74 years old. There are 27 works in his current show at Jane Lombard Gallery, and it’s his first exhibition in nearly 10 years.
An architect by training, Wexler creates wonderfully clever, imaginative, and elegant sculptures that magnify the absurdities of everyday activities. In the center of the white, windowless, subterranean downstairs of the gallery, for instance, sits “Light Table” (2021). Constructed of simple planar volumes and painted institutional gray, the sculpture is determinedly grim. Clear glass dishes and bowls, laid out as though for a meal, are partially submerged into the tabletop. Bright white lights illuminate the glassware from below. A tangled viscera of black electrical cords droop below the table, delivering power to the lights and adding a touch of the dystopian. In leaving the cords so casually exposed, Wexler makes clear that he isn’t performing a magic trick but rather presenting an industrial effect, something managed through mechanical devices and integrated into the world of power grids and domestic untidiness. If his work is otherworldly, its strangeness is still tethered to this one.
