BRIDGEPORT, CT.- The Housatonic Museum of Art presents an installation by Norwalk-based artist Matthias Alfen of recently completed sculptures at the Johnson Atelier in New Jersey as well as small survey show of his early works. The exhibition will be held from December 8, 2006 through February 21, 2007. An opening reception will be held for the artist December 8 from 7:30 pm until 10:00pm in the gallery and the public is cordially invited to attend.

Matthias Alfen began his career, in the late eighties, making insular, solid, geometrical sculptures, usually based on the cube. These works were explicitly monumental and massive, giving them a certain inner power, and can be read as strictly formal constructions. Geometrical intelligibility is transcendental, universal, and unchanging; the memorial and sacramental functions of geometry—Alfen’s stele and cross--confirms its innate sacredness, and are credible only because of that sacredness.

But unexpectedly, in the New Millennium--as though making a break with his own past as well as the modernist past of geometrical abstraction (regarded by Alfred Barr, along with gestural abstraction, as the grand climax of modernist achievement)--Alfen began making very human figures. Alfen now uses softer materials--clay, plaster, polymer, wood--although a few sculptures are in bronze, like several of the geometrical sculptures. Virtually all of the figures are naked, and however twisted and self-contradictory

Matthias Alfen’s new series of Janus figures are an innovation in figural art predicated on the advances made by the Futurist sculptor and painter Umberto Boccioni. Whereas Boccioni celebrated technology and speed, Alfen’s installation is an apocalyptic vision of a future where the Utopian dream of progress has produced dangerous side effects such as greenhouses gases, toxic waste, global warming and weapons of mass destruction.

Art critic and author Donald Kuspit has written of Alfen’s work, “Clearly there has been a major change in attitude, sensibility, form, and expressivity - a basic change in heart and style. Alfen’s turn away from abstraction to figuration-whatever residues of modernist abstraction are incorporated in the figure, instead, Alfen uses inorganic geometry to convey the complex dynamics of its organic space. In short, the negative and positive spaces--the “ins and outs” -- of the geometrical sculptures have been transposed to the figurative sculptures, but they now have visceral rather than only formal significance. They suggest the mysteriousness of the lived body. Turning the body inside out, as it were, Alfen turns the body into a kind of Mobius strip. Inner space and outer form flow into one another, almost becoming indistinguishable and interchangeable. Alfen’s figures involve the same paradoxical coordination of inner and outer as his cubes, but in a more perplexing, intense way.

The ruthless split in Alfen’s bodies and heads, indicating a self divided against itself-a self that is a precarious structure of opposites, and thus perpetually on the verge of coming apart-suggests the inherently traumatic character of human existence. The split implies that the threat of disintegration is innate. But without inner integrity or wholeness, the outside world is also threatening, which is perhaps why many of Alfen’s male figures face it with clenched fists and tensed muscles. They are ready to do battle with it because there is nothing they can do about the conflict built into them.

Tragic irony is explicit in Alfen’s Fossilmenschen series, 2002-2003, his most expressively daring works to date. Alfen seems to be suggesting that human beings will become extinct, victims of their own uncontrollable violence and brutality, signaled by the display of teeth in several mouths, opened wide as if in a scream but also, ambiguously, in anger and rage. Is Alfen saying that we will survive only as archeological finds displayed in the natural history and/or art museums-what greater art than that created by nature?--of post-human beings? The figures embedded-sedimented-in Alfen’s rusting walls suggest as much. Violence is explicit and many of the sculptures are nightmarish and grotesque, especially the surreal stoneware heads. They are masterpieces of agony and doubleness, all the more ironic because it proliferates seemingly ad infinitum. Alfen has outdone himself, both expressively and formally. They are his most complicated constructions. Subtle color adds to their resonance. In the current exhibition, heads float in a charcoal river, confirming their morbid meaning: the river is black with the death--and perhaps also forgetfulness, to refer to Lethe, the mythological river the dead crossed in antiquity--in which humanity is drowning. (There is a classical, heroic aspect to many of Alfen’s heads, confirmed by their epic look; many are in effect archaeological fragments.) The Guardian Head that watches over the heads floating in charcoal cannot protect them from their fate. All the catastrophic wars of the twentieth century-many historians have said it is the most barbaric, brutal of any century are epitomized by the black charcoal. It is a powerful symbol of death and despair: one has only to light the charcoal to start a conflagration-a holocaust.

Matthias Alfen’s art is a major contribution to-a brilliant extension of-the ‘art of the scream,’ as German Expressionism was called when it emerged at the troubled beginning of the twentieth century. Alfen’s doomed heads indicate that there is still a deep need for it in the twenty-first century.”

The Burt Chernow Galleries are open Monday through Friday from 8:30am until 5:30 pm and Thursday evenings until 7pm. Saturday from 9 to 3pm and Sunday Noon until 4pm. Closed all state and major holidays.