Harold Wortsman: Time and Space - Very Old and Very New

Orange Art Foundation is pleased to present Time and Space - Very Old and Very New, an online solo exhibition of works by Harold Wortsman. On view digitally now through Sunday, March 13, 2022, with an artist talk coming in January. 

This exhibition features a variety of works by Wortsman, including Sculpture, Reliefs, Prints, all relating to clay, the artist’s preferred medium. Wortsman has worked in clay since the age of five. His work is abstract, rather than naturalistic, and derives from the exploration of space, whether two dimensional or three dimensional. 

Many years ago, Wortsman discovered oxides as a source of color, which reveals the surface below like tattoo or watercolor. The artist likens the working process to a jazz improvisation, each kiln load is slightly different: The work is high-fired in a gas kiln with reduction. At a certain point oxygen intake is reduced to the kiln (reduction). The fire needs oxygen and chemically takes it from the clay. 

“Wortsman’s art, both his three-dimensional works and his reliefs, are idiosyncratic but hardly eccentric. They relate to a way of seeing that encompasses great amounts of time, but the work cannot be read as antiquarian or scholarly. Instead, they address the primal continuity of sculpture, in which time itself becomes an important part of the pieces’ ambience.”

“Wortsman has done a wonderful job of bridging old and new time, concentrating on an art whose depth is direct, moving, and formally accomplished. His work is accessible while remaining informed in its assumptions. We greatly need this artist’s perspective, whose boundaries are fluid and suggest a new world to come.”

— Jonathan Goodman

At a time when real “time and space” is ambiguous due to the global issue, Wortsman’s work brings relief and comfort, as well as a new perspective, hopefully, evoking the “real” world. 

ABOUT Harold Wortsman
Harold Wortsman is a sculptor and printmaker based in Brooklyn, NY. He “creates forms that bring to mind archaic cult objects and exude a quiet concentrated strength.” (Argauer Zeitung, Switzerland). His work, an edgy mix of freedom and clarity, can be found in public and private collections in the US and Europe as well as such American institutions as The Library of Congress, Yale University, The New York Public Library Print Collection, The New York Historical Society, Smith College, Indiana University’s Lilly Library, Brandeis University, The Newark Public Library Special Collections Division, and the Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum Print Archive.

About Orange Art Foundation
Orange Art Foundation is an experimental curatorial platform committed to supporting, realizing, and preserving the artists' vision by organizing exhibitions, publishing books, and collecting work of artists that present shifts in contemporary art practice and thought.

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