“Wendell Castle: Living” opened Thursday at Friedman Benda and runs through October 17. Rather than putting Castle’s biomorphic furniture into a white-box chronology, the gallery has reconstructed rooms from the converted mill outside Rochester where he lived with the ceramic artist Nancy Jurs. Their daughter Alison co-curated it. The Financial Times visits the exhibition
Castle’s stack-lamination technique—building up thick layers of wood, then carving them—made furniture that could swell, curl and balance in ways conventional joinery discouraged. The domestic setting should make the work more legible: the 1962 music stand, 1964 walnut stool, a wonderfully improbable 1973 coat rack and the later Arcadia settee were used among books, ceramics and ordinary life.
This is a good Saturday art-and-design stop because it asks a pleasurable question: does sculptural furniture become stranger or more convincing when somebody actually has to live with it? The reconstructed house is necessarily an argument, not time travel, but it restores scale and companionship that isolated auction photographs remove.