Producing Essential Forms: The Sculpture of Jonathan Prince

By Alexandra Anderson-Spivy

The first time I saw Jonathan Prince’s sculpture I experienced a genuine, ungovernable shock of recognition—the physical sensation of “this is the real thing” that comes all too rarely to an art critic. The sheer authority, apollonian vitality, and ambitious scale of his works in solid stone identified Prince on the spot as an exceptional artist. His debt to the formal interests of artistic predecessors such as Constantin Brancusi, Isamu Noguchi, Jean Arp and other twentieth century masters of biomorphic form revealed his classical modernist heritage. But it did not obscure his achievement.

By early 2007, after little more than 24 months of dedicated labor in the studio, Prince had internalized that visual heritage and swiftly moved into a more personally expressive zone, creating essential forms abstracted from his knowledge of science and engineering, nature, and the human body. How had such accomplished work so quickly come about? Ever since Prince’s early artistic forays as a student he had been ineluctably drawn to shaping granite, basalt and marble. After an eclectic and distinguished medical and creative career he propelled himself back to the studio and into making mature sculpture, refined in concept and fearless in execution, at warp speed.

Jonathan Prince works with a bracing independence of mind. His vision, honed by resolve and skill, is not contingent on current febrile art world fashion. He seeks to reveal essential forms. His methods, while employing the most sophisticated technical equipment, remain that of a direct carver, which is probably the most challenging means of making sculpture. As art historian Sidney Geist wrote, “The hand of the direct carver is guided by the force of his conception, which in turn is influenced inevitably by the carving procedure and the material...The sculpture that results from this method of working is more conceptual, less naturalistic and less nuanced than that produced by modeling. The hardness of the materials and the relative difficulty in fashioning them influence the economy of the task.” Direct carving, when properly employed, produces, rather than reproduces, form.

Prince’s forms are found in such recent monumental works as his “Closed Torus” (2006), “Plurality” (2006)-a horizontal tour de force in polished and unpolished basalt, and his stunning ebony granite “Ellipsis” (2007), its twinned ellipses delicately balanced yet utterly secure in monumental, mirroring calm. One of Prince’s most recent works, “Light Box” (2007), challenges the structural possibilities of stone, calibrating just how much material could be carved out of the solid rock while preserving the volume of the black African granite cube.

These days, sculptors face special impediments unknown to other artists—for example, work in stone is hard to transport and challenging to exhibit. But in Prince’s case overcoming those obstacles is well worth the trouble it takes. One can only hope that his work rapidly receives the wide and serious audience it deserves.

Alexandra Anderson-Spivy, a correspondent for ArtNet.com and the former editor in chief of Art & Antiques magazine, is an art critic who lives and works in New York City.

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