Fuse Eva Hesse with Richard Tuttle and you’ve in Heide Hinrichs territory. She has Hesse’s love of the ungainly protuberance and the heavy edit of Tuttle’s subtlety. In my mother’s darker moments, she liked to say, “I wish they’d drop the bomb so we could go underground.” Hinrichs is an artist of the solitary’s apocalypse. Those who stagger back into the light after losing everything would be lucky to find her sculptures on the floor, the flayed skin of soccer ball bladders hung on a wire or deflated inner tubes curled as if smoked in a fire.
Born in Germany and currently living in Seattle, she is the subject of a solo exhibit curated by Marisa Sanchez at the Seattle Art Museum, part of a series titled SAM NEXT, whose focus is alternatively regional and international.
The objects in this show, both found and fabricated, collectively create a kind of landscape. There is solace in its silence, a quiet that enfolded the viewer who walks inside it. A few weeks ago, I saw a small group of rowdy middle-schoolers enter and respond, their hush a tribute.
Through June 13.
Leave a Reply