Sculpture by Robert Fry

Two new exhibitions opened Friday, February 2 in the Cincinnati Arts Association’s Weston Art Gallery featuring the evocative and imaginative wood-carved figures and tableaus of Cincinnati artist Stephanie Cooper, and the quietly elegant minimalist forms of Robert Fry. The contrasting figurative and non-objective approaches the artists employ in their sculpture are linked by both artists’ primary use of wood and their shared interest in its versatility, intrinsic beauty, and symbolic and spiritual nature.

Robert Fry creates distinctive and quietly elegant sculptures that convey a subtle balance between contrasting forms. Working primarily in wood, Fry also incorporates other natural materials such as rope and stone in addition to such man-made materials as paint, wire and metal. The artist’s working method is simple and direct, combining traditional woodworking and carving methods to arrive at an efficiency of form. His sculpture ranges in scale from pedestal-size works to large-scale freestanding pieces measuring up to nine feet in height. In recent years, Fry has participated in several outdoor sculpture exhibitions, including the Chicago Navy Pier Walk, effectively increasing the scale of his work.

As an introduction to his exhibition in the lower level of the Weston Art Gallery, Fry has premiered a new large-scale piece, Negative Space, in the challenging environs of the street-level exhibition space. This piece consists of an 8’ open wooden cube constructed from salvaged lumber, supporting an overlapping grid of black steel pipe on each open side of the cube. The pipe supports interlocking 15’ timbers intersecting the cube’s central core and extends out each side and through the top. The commanding scale of the work and its inherent openness, further Fry’s ongoing investigation into negative and positive space. The work exhibited downstairs in the west gallery includes newly completed sculpture as well as a selection of his earlier work completed since 1995.

Fry lives in Covington, Ky., and studied art at Thomas More College and Northern Kentucky University. His sculpture has been exhibited both regionally and nationally since 1983. This exhibition is sponsored by Bill and Sue Friedlander and Bartlett & Co.