Ilan Averbuch: Public Projects

FROM THE BOOK

"What Averbuch has achieved in his personal style, and what no other contemporary sculptor has done to anywhere near the same degree, is fuse together the visual linguistics of public presentation with the private imaginative formulations of pure aesthetic investigation. In a phrase, he creates public works that replace commemoration with rumination, with pure, free-roaming imaginative speculation, without sacrificing the public role each work plays. His sculptures are assertively personal exercises of creative thought, employing a set of idiomatic forms and symbols of his own devising, and yet they are not hermetic. At the same time as they are entirely personal, they are also highly and surprisingly accessible to the general viewer, as is evident from their popularity and the number of public commissions he continues to obtain. The sculptures are austere in their reserve, in the purity with which they speak Averbuch's private artistic vocabulary, and yet they are inviting to the viewer--actually, more than inviting, they are prepossessing. There is a rich, intellectually compelling component to his sculptures, and there is also a sense in which they are immediately and inescapably likable, which is no small thing for any artist."

Mark Daniel Cohen, excerpted from Ilan Averbuch: The New Paradigm of Public Sculpture in Public Projects.