How to take pleasure in beauty, knowing the cruelty that surrounds us? In this exhibition, Melvin Edwards posed this question seriously, seeking an answer in the fundamental American contradiction between our declared ideal of freedom and the violence that underpins it.
The show was nominated for his greatest work, Lines for the poet, 1970/2023, a sculptural installation mounted in a corner of the room. There, lengths of barbed wire cascaded from adjacent walls. They met in the middle; these strands hung from the long arm of a steel beam, forming a hammock-like support to suspend it just above the ground, where it sank into space like the bow of a ship. Characteristically, the work merges abstraction with evocation. It distills gravity into a formal principle à la post-Minimal “lines in space”. But it does so in materials irrevocably associated with coercive confinement and enforced separation – specifically, with the anti-black brutality at the heart of American history.
Edwards is best known for these barbed wire installations, as well as his ongoing “Lynch Fragments” series, 1960–, which includes welded steel wall assemblies composed of highly charged materials (chains, padlocks, scissors, knives, among other things). Recently, these sculptures have been presented in several high profile exhibitions in major museums. One would expect Edwards to enjoy his well-deserved, albeit belated, recognition. Instead, he bypasses our critical understanding with startling, unseen work.
In 2019, Alexander Gray Associates presented ‘Painted Sculpture’, a competition of freestanding welded works in primary colors: joyous experiments in axiality, balance and solidity. These abstractions remind us how much certain forms draw us into our embodied daily experience, the way an entrance seems to invite passage, or a ladder to climb. Without Edwards’ usual politicized materials, these playful forms resist any didacticism.
Centered on its sculptural namesake, “Lines for the Poet” seemed like a return to more familiar ground. But it was otherwise dedicated to previously unseen works on paper – images with their own enigmatic meaning. To make them, Edwards laid chains and threads on unpainted sheets while applying pigment. Using these tools as masking, he kept negative reservations in luscious color fields. Sometimes soaked through the paper, sometimes dripping onto its surface, sometimes loaded onto a brush and blasted with a spray bottle, this liquid shade was sporty and cheerful.
Saturation, gesture and chromaticity come together idiosyncratically. One could, I suppose, compare the works to the dyes of Helen Frankenthaler, the dyes of Sam Gilliam or the sprays of Jules Olitski. But the warp and yarn spectra are so essential to their effect – as forms as well as figures – that the comparison never takes off. On the one hand, Edwards alludes to the vaunted Americanness of formalist painting, in which the experimental application of paint metaphorizes our national yearning for freedom and self-reliance. On the other, he rewrites this history with repressive violence at its heart, instruments of cruelty appearing like a spectral void, reminders of what American triumphalism must omit or disavow. These absences mark the surfaces like old wounds, never completely healed, which always throb before the rain.
The duality makes these works both striking and disturbing. Edwards thus challenges us to reconcile the brutal evocations of their silhouetted tools with the ravishing satisfaction of their material qualities. Torment becomes beauty: not in the banal way of lemons giving lemonade, but in a galvanizing contradiction between the ambitious modernism the artist truly celebrates and the kinds of repression with which that tradition is complicit. Edwards probes the disturbing seduction of violence at the crossroads of pleasure and pain.
