Beneath the Skin:
Petah Coyne At The Albright-Knox

By Bruce Adams
Petah Coyne artwork
Untitled #978 Gertrude and Juliana (The Whitney Women) 1999-2000.
Petah Coyne.

Some artists defy easy classification. Someone like Paul Klee breaks formation with the artists of his time and develops an idiosyncratic style that soars on its own inspired course. Both Joseph Cornell with his bric-a-brac-filled boxes and Nancy Graves with her simulated camel bones resist pigeonholing through groundbreaking use of media. Pioneers like Christo and Eva Hesse use media innovatively, with idiosyncratic methods that set them apart from the mainstream. Attempts at categorization can also be stymied by artists like avant-garde chameleon Man Ray, who switched media and bounced from movement to movement, or those such as Georgia O’Keefe, whose art and spiritual essence are inseparably fused.

Sculptor and photographer Petah Coyne falls into all of these categories. Coyne is constantly breaking new ground, then using the broken ground along with just about anything else she finds lying around to make highly personal art that’s not easy to wedge into a single conceptual framework. Petah Coyne: Above and Beneath the Skin is an exhibition of the artist’s work produced from the late eighties through 2004. Organized by Albright-Knox senior curator Douglas Dreishpoon, the show has previously toured the country to positive reviews. It concludes with an extended stay at the Albright-Knox through September 10.

Petah Coyne artwork
Untitled #1093 (Buddha Boy), 2001.
Petah Coyne.
Coyne’s sculptural works—her “girls” as she calls them—have been dubbed eccentric by some critics, which in her case might actually qualify as an understatement. Picture massive suspended sculptures heaped with beads, ribbons and bows, assorted debris, flowers, and taxidermy birds, all coated in a dense wax frosting as if petrified, Pompeian-style, in volcanic ash. Visualize religious statuary miraculously penetrating walls or densely encrusted with innumerable black or white wax flowers as if they were engulfed by growths from some horrific cake decoration disease. Envision wildly spiraling tornado-shaped forms of steel, cable, rope, sand, and chicken wire, “whisking” tree branches, shackles, and what appear in photographs to be stuffed muslin sacks, along with other unlikely objects.

It would be difficult to imagine a medium not employed at one time or another by Coyne, whose catalog of materials reads like the combined inventories of Home Depot and Michaels craft store: plaster, wood (natural and processed), candles, fiberglass, chain connectors, silk, drywall, string pearls, chain link fencing, soil, swivels, feathers, assorted metal hardware, tar, paint, irrigation tubing, pumps, water, berries, human hair, and massive amounts of “specially formulated” wax. Or consider instead Coyne’s large-scale silver gelatin print photographs. Blurry, cool, placid, even when depicting dynamic action, they seem a dramatic contrast to the artist’s densely complex sculptures.

Petah Coyne artwork
Untitled #875 (Black Atlanta), 1997.
Petah Coyne.
Coyne’s bewildering leap into the art world’s consciousness began abruptly with her first public artistic endeavor, in which the emerging artist hung innumerable dead, decomposing fish from neighborhood trees. The putrefying catch had previously resided in the artist’s New York City loft, where ongoing attempts at ritualistic preservation—an artistic expression linked to Coyne’s much-publicized obsession with illness and death—had failed to stave off decay’s inexorable advance. This association with disease and mortality continues to permeate her very personal style, which has been described as Victorian, even funereal in nature. Yet despite the unquestionably mournful quality of much of the work, it seems simultaneously celebrative, even at times weirdly festive. This duality is but one of many poetic paradoxes that define Coyne’s art. Her extreme use of decoration is the antithesis of minimalism, yet the works have the contemplative, even transcendent quality that one associates with minimalist forms. They are decidedly abstract, yet often simultaneously figurative; massive and heavy, but nothing if not fragile; feminist, yet seductively feminine.

Regardless of what you make of Coyne’s work, it is a sight to see.


Bruce Adams is an artist, educator, and writer living in Buffalo.


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