Marlborough Gallery makes room for Otterness-size shows

Tom Otterness before his new bronze sculpture “Immigrant Family (Large),” 2007, installed at the new Marlborough Chelsea gallery.

By Stephanie Murg

Right now, a large man sits sobbing in Hudson River Park. He’s been there, crouched in despair, since last Monday. He holds his head in his hands, and attracts children, who like to comfort him by climbing on his lap — which doesn’t bother him, because he is made entirely of bronze.

The figure is “Large Sad Sphere,” the creation of New York-based sculptor Tom Otterness, who is perhaps best known for “Life Underground,” his more than 100 mischievous, cartoony bronze figures scattered about the A/C/E subway station at 14th St. and 8th Ave. Otterness’s roly-poly corps of people, animals, and objects inhabits a parallel universe that teems with curiosity and industry: they sweep up piles of pennies, tote oversized tools, and peek under fences. All the while, the supercute figures toy subversively with such themes as love, money, security, and class.

“Large Sad Sphere” infuses the artist’s distinctive whimsy with a new depth of emotion. “Usually, as parents, we think ‘Oh, give kids happy sculptures all the time,’” says Otterness. “And I think that kids are really touched by having something with real emotion or with a different emotion to acknowledge that sometimes they’re sad.”

The sculpture, part of the 40th anniversary celebration of the Department of Parks & Recreation’s public art program, is on loan from the Marlborough Chelsea gallery, which opened its new space on Thursday at 545 W. 25th St. Inaugurating the 10,000-square-foot space is Otterness’s first major gallery exhibition in five years and the first major Manhattan solo show for painter Steven Charles.

Founded in London in 1946, Marlborough Gallery opened its midtown Manhattan gallery in 1963 and ultimately added outposts in Madrid, Barcelona, Monte Carlo, and Santiago, Chile. The original Marlborough Chelsea opened on W. 19th St. in 1997 and closed in June of last year in preparation for the relocation.

The new Marlborough Chelsea occupies the first and second floors of the 21-story Chelsea Arts Tower and includes an outdoor sculpture terrace on the second floor. The rectangular space, designed by architect Richard Gluckman, has a large glass wall to the south and three movable walls that can divide the space in different ways. Gluckman says that in executing the project, he worked “to take advantage of the streetfront and exploit the available natural light,” he says, adding that for him, an ideal gallery is a “well lit, well proportioned space that works well with the type of art to be installed.”

Marlborough President Pierre Levai notes that the new gallery was specifically designed “to show monumental sculpture and work by emerging artists and photographers.” And “monumental” certainly describes the seven bronze sculptures that comprise “The Public Unconscious,” the exhibition of Otterness’s work on view at Marlborough Chelsea through Nov. 3.

Upon entering the first-floor gallery, one encounters “The Consumer,” a fat man in a tiny hat who is busy gobbling an assembly line-style procession of delivery trucks and smaller figures hauling supersized commodities including a diamond ring, a pack of cigarettes, and a fish. Meanwhile, a tiny figure at the base of the work pilfers coins from a rip in the large moneybag on which the consumer sits. “’The Consumer’ is a really audacious sculpture,” says Marlborough Gallery Director Janis Gardner Cecil. “It’s also a challenging work, a comment on consumer society.”

At the core of the exhibition is “Immigrant Family,” a ten-foot-high sculpture of a father, mother, and baby who have recently arrived in a new world. The work was commissioned by Toronto-based real estate developer Mark Mandelbaum. “I had first proposed a tourist couple, with a camera and suitcases,” says Otterness. “And [Mandelbaum] said, ‘Oh, how about an immigrant family?’ because his family immigrated to Toronto.”

Otterness describes this process of “haggling” over subject matter as one of the benefits of the public work that he has been engaged in for decades. “It’s great in a sense to be taken by these outside forces to some area I would never have imagined on my own in my studio — if I had stayed in closed-door studio practice,” he says.

The parents of “Immigrant Family” have their shiny, round heads turned toward the baby, making the swaddled figure the radiant focus, but this wasn’t the original plan. Originally, the father was looking upward at the city. “At the last minute, when it was a full-scale clay sculpture, I chopped off his head,” says Otterness. “Turning the head to look at the baby was an important change. It made the baby the star. And I like that both the parents are looking at the baby and the baby is the one looking out at the world.”

“Part of what’s unexpected in Otterness’s simple cartoon world is that the details feel so true,” writes art critic Hilarie Sheets in her exhibition catalogue essay. “The contact places between the forms — where the button on the man’s vest pulls the fabric or where the baby clutches its mother’s thumb — are critical for the artist, who wants the viewer to recognize something physically convincing even within the radical distortions.”

Born in Wichita, Kansas, Otterness came to New York at the age of 18. He counts Walt Disney, Works Progress Administration art, and animation of the 1930s among his key influences. Mayan and Chinese art also factor into his work. “I try to boil it down into this universal form, one that includes all of those major cultures as well as the smiley face and pop, universal sign-symbols,” says Otterness. “I’m trying to meld all of those things together to create a universal language that hopefully crosses cultures and that everybody can read simply.”

Otterness’s success in devising a universally appealing visual language is apparent from how viewers of all ages relate to his work. Subway riders pausing on the 14th St. platform are made to feel like temporary citizens in the underground world of the bronze creatures and are somehow comforted that it will continue to bubble with productivity once the train doors close. Similarly, visitors to Marlborough Chelsea regard “Dressed up Millipede” (a giant, shoe-wearing anthropod) and “Kissing Dung Beetles” (embracing atop a globe) with both awe and affection.

Are all of the characters — the about-to-burst capitalist, the hopeful family, the crestfallen gourd-shaped man in the park — part of the same world at the same time? “There’s a belief or a myth in parts of Africa that there’s a simultaneous reality walking around in our own, and I’ve always liked that idea,” says Otterness. “I think that their world exists with our world, and they’re all on their planet the same as we’re on ours.”