By Daniel Johanson
“Porcine Player,” found and fabricated metal. Photo: Paul Bobrowitz.
A sculpture’s first spot in Paul Bobrowitz’s outdoor gallery may leave it harder to see from every side. He moves pieces when a better place becomes apparent, sometimes after a sale or rental opens up space.
“I do move pieces at later dates to what appear at the time to be better suited locations,” Bobrowitz wrote in an email interview.
His Spectacular Sculpture outdoor gallery occupies six acres in southeastern Wisconsin, with a working studio on-site. In his written answers, he separates choosing a location from revising a sculpture.
“Placement does not affect form,” he wrote.
A change to the sculpture comes from what he sees in the work as he continues to live with it. “Form may and often does change as I see the piece over time and realize that there are things I want to change,” he wrote.
Those revisions can include “opening up more negative spaces or sometimes adding elements,” Bobrowitz explained. The space within a sculpture can become something he wants to reconsider, just as the space around it can suggest a better place to set it.
The decisions can arrive days after making a piece, or weeks, months, years or decades later, he said. He described those revisions as happening “as my POV changes and grows.”
That changing viewpoint does not come only from looking at his own work alone. Visitors have made him more attentive to how he presents it.
“Over the decades visitors responses have led me to pay more attention to my slapdash plunk placement,” Bobrowitz wrote.
He also recalled strong positive and negative reactions to a work he titled Collective. For public displays, he favors work that can “get people to engage more,” he explained.
A buyer’s photograph can give him another view too. He described being surprised when a sculpture he thought looked merely OK on his grounds appeared much stronger in the buyer’s landscape. The work could look different to him once someone else had found a place for it.
He described his own changing perspective as something he hopes will continue for the rest of his life. But continued attention does not mean that every sculpture needs another alteration.
Some pieces stayed with him for thirty years before the right buyer took them home, Bobrowitz said, and he left those works alone because he considered them right. “I never changed a thing about those,” he wrote.
