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Above: Cast gold pendant on silk chain. 
Below: "Malcom X: Monument IV," cast bronze and silk sculpture, 36 1/2" x 36" x 30".
Opposite page: "Sheila," sculpture of cast aluminum, 24 3/8" x 5 1/8", and silk, 54" long.
Barbara Chase-Riboud by Fay Lansner

The materials of Barbara Chase-Riboud's sculpture make a majestic duality-bronze/silk, bronze/wool, steel/synthetic fiber, aluminum/synthetic. A sense of mystery, terror, luxury, and lyricism pervades all her work. Thirty-five pieces-twenty sculptures and fifteen jewels-are on view at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York (March 21-April 8). It is her second one-woman show-her first was held at the Bertha Schaefer Gallery, New York, in 1970, and then sent to the Hayden Gallery of Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Barbara Chase-Riboud begins her sculpture with wax sheets which she makes herself from 24" x 12" x 2" blocks of synthetic wax which she buys from the Shell Oil Company. The blocks are melted down and poured onto forms covered in thin plastic. The accidental folds that occur with the pouring of the hot wax onto the plastic cloth are used in the welding and cutting of the sheets into various forms which are stacked until there are enough to begin a new sculpture.

In a letter to Regina Perry at Yale University, Barbara Chase-Riboud writes: "The basic idea behind the present work is twofold. First the combination of two opposing materials, hard and soft. This has African connotations, especially if one considers the African dancing mask (wood) is always combined with other materials: raffia, hemp, leather, feathers, cord, metal chains or bells, as are African fetishes. Each has an aesthetic function as well as a symbolic and spiritual one. My idea is to reinterpret the aesthetic function in contemporary terms using non-anthropological materials (bronze/silk, bronze/wool, steel/synthetic). When it works (it doesn't work all the time), the tension and opposition between the two materials transfer some of the aspects of one to the other(metal becomes soft, silk becomes hard, as in the 'Malcolm X' series to form a unity of opposites). Parallel to this is the use of hard and soft materials as symbolic male/female elements. I have  (continued on page 65)

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