Alexander Salazar Fine Art, 640 Broadway – Suite A, San Diego is proud to exhibit the new collection of wall sculptures for the contemporary art collector by Craig French. These Mixed Media Original works are created by Craig French (American, b. 1959) using Metal, Wood, Glass, and Steel. Ultimately, the combination of the three create a gestural sculpture that is filled with hard edge lines that disappear into the glass like waterfalls. Craig French began his sculpture career at 14 years old at the Laguna Beach Boys Club metal shop. As a teen aged AFS scholarship student living in Australia, French was politically and artistically influenced by Sculptor Alan Ingham (Assistant of Henry Moore). From his first Pop-Art exhibition in Tokyo, Japan in 1990 to present, French’s brilliant and lyrical sculptures have gained an international audience.
Cast resins, acrylics, sheet metals, rare woods, and exotic glass are laboriously cut, shaped, lathed, and polished into rich and fluid forms-then joined and intertwined into arresting color-texture combinations.
These multi-media works rest, dance, play, spin, and sing to create an abstract language inflected by many accents. Yet they all are unified by overarching themes of aesthetic optimism, joy, and a duty to fine craftsmanship.
A California native, French believes his art issues from “the beauty and rhythm and the flow of poetry and music.” The ‘Flow’ seems indispensable to any discussion of his work- The stationary materials metamorphose into sinuous loops, bends, whorls and swirls. French forces the bodily stuff of his art to such extremes that glass, wood and metal loses their inertness taking on the dynamic of motion.
“I combine both the elements of painting and sculpture in my work; and by utilizing the various aspects of these two media, distinctions are blurred and new artistic directions are discovered”, French explains.
“The intrinsic beauty of the various materials and the process of constructing a sculpture are just as much the art as the finished work.”
Your are invited to view these amazing pieces in person in San Diego at Alexander Salazar Fine Art – 640 Broadway – Suite A, San Diego, CA 92101 619-531-8996 [email protected]