Bill Georgenes: Unity & Multitude / SantaFe Community College Visual Arts Gallery / September 2015 - Sculpture Magazine, Exhibition review, December 2015
The sculptures of Bill Georgenes in this exhibition defy expectations. The work is fresh and intensely focused. Made from cheap plastic toys, his constructions could be the fabrications of a young artist. Yet Georgenes is a man in his mid-eighties, who studied at Yale when Josef Albers was on faculty.
Georgenes’s early works were paintings, elegant and abstract, just what one would have expected from an artist with a Yale education. Yet 23 years ago, he began creating sculptures that were very different from anything he had previously made, finding his most personal creative voice. These sculptures transcend academic training and resonate with the energy of a man driven and unencumbered by the burden of art history.
Toys transformed into sculptures provoke dream-like memories. However for Georgenes, there were no toys in his childhood world. During the first four years of his life, he lived alone in an attic; his only entertainment was a small window to observe passersby. Keeping him isolated was not a disturbing act of cruelty, but rather a gesture of love and protection. His mother suffered from tuberculosis and out of concern for his health, he was kept from her.
After his mother’s death, he became a ward of the state and was sent to live in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Only four years old, Georgenes spoke rudimentary Greek, his mother’s native language, and did not understand English. The administrators at the institution thought he was probably mute, as they could not find a way to communicate with him.
At the sanatorium, Georgenes was left to do as he pleased, generally unsupervised. He would wander the wards, interacting with adult patients, who slowly taught him English. It was in this environment that Georgenes made his first drawings, which he would sell to patients for pennies to buy candy.
Georgenes’s childhood informs his sculptures much more than his erudite education. He has let go of an intellectual approach to making art, replacing it with a more visceral orientation. Like self-taught outsider artists, Georgenes is profoundly motivated to translate internal and intimate emotions into art.
Although confined to a wheelchair and challenged by health issues, William Georgenes is prolific, working in his studio everyday. With this exhibition he declares that a senior artist can be conceptually innovative, edgy and even a bit rebellious.
