Thoughts That Cure Radically: Christopher Wilmarth at Betty Cunningham Gallery

Darkness descends in Betty Cunningham’s mini-retrospective of Christopher Wilmarth’s sculpture and drawing. Wilmarth, who committed suicide at the age of forty-four in 1987, made sculptures with steel and etched glass, of which two maquettes are on view at Cunningham. Part of the generation of artist succeeding minimalism along with Sol Lewitt and Eva Hesse, WIlmarth’s work employs the reductive strategies of the era along with the personal, romantic and gothic sensibilities made his own. Like Hesse, Wilmarth died young leaving behind an abbreviated corpus of work.

In the late 70s Wilmarth left gallery representation to found The Studio for the First Amendment. In a 1980 manifesto for the gallery Wilmarth wrote, “I have at times in my life experienced realizations, a heightened feeling of being alive and connected in this world at which times a vision of ideal existence was presented to me.” Wilmarth’s sculpture spiritualizes minimalism strict phenomenological precepts. Eschewing traditional routes of exposure and career, Wilmarth stood in line with other American non-conformists like Emerson and Thoreau.

Betty Cunningham’s doors are covered in black and Christopher Wilmarth’s work is limited to somber colors of black, brown and frosted glass. The inside space feels funereal. Based on the exhibition, Wilmarth’s work was promising and brief. In a fallow up statement to his Studio for the First Amendment Wilmarth writes:

“’No longer is heavenly distance the preferred escape. The learning self defends.’

What I am trying to say here is that with my work of the past eight years I have tried to make sculptures that evoke a spiritual disembodied state close to that of reverie; the kind of perfection that I found during my ‘revelations’ or ‘epiphanies’. I have avoided in my recent sculpture poetry directly tied to the imperfect, earthly world of flesh and matter. I have the need to be in and of that imperfect world again and make my poems from its stuff…”