Linda Fleming : Lingering

Noted Colorado/California artist Linda Fleming's solo exhibition at Robischon Gallery entitled, "Lingering," is comprised of medium and large-scale sculpture works, primarily of painted and chromed steel. With complex geometric forms that give equal consideration to the potentialities of both the ephemeral and the fluidly architectonic, each dynamic sculpture reflects an introspective investigation of the natural world and Fleming's distinctive expansion upon it.

For over three decades, Fleming has gained attention for her bold steel and wood linear works utilizing log forms and salvaged docks, for example, and for the inventiveness of her varied surface treatments. In recent years, the artist's approach to materials has shifted, but remains thoughtfully driven toward expressing forms from the natural to the cosmological. Fleming's works in "Lingering," including Fumerole, explore curvilinear forms suggestive of smoke tendrils, lace or an elaborate blossom unfurling. At eight feet tall and thirteen feet wide, Fumerole is indicative of the artist's even larger sculptures such as the grand-scale, recently installed Reverie that is sited outside the entrance of the University of Nebraska's International Quilt Study Center and Museum. With Fleming's strong sense of purpose in contrasting materials to uncommon ideas, Reverie's tracery steel construction, the artist states, in this instance conceptually links her process to quilt-making. With this in mind, Fleming's intersection of flowing elements with hard-edged materiality invokes the many substantive dualities inherent in her work; masculine/feminine and organic/hard- edged, all residing in the fertile ground in-between.

As a vast ongoing study over the years in form and scale, Linda Fleming's studio maquettes continue to inform and evolve as the artist's pivotal source material. Investigating the forms in nature and humankind's place within, her intricate maquettes, like her large and monumental sculptures, suggest encompassing universes beyond human perception as they extend outward. Considered contextually, these differing approaches to scale allow a view into the artist's larger thought process exploring a consciousness that exists simultaneously in both the concrete and the abstract. Meteorite, one of Fleming's exhibited felt-fabric works, holds a particular moment in the exhibition as its soft, dense non-reflective material further animates overhead in dialogue with the highly light-responsive works beneath. Fleming's chromed wall pieces like Whirlwind and Cumulus visually amplify as they merge with their environments reflecting light or the color of their surroundings – even the viewers themselves as they stand before the sculptures. In union with to the energized and imposing works, Fleming has long selected and placed simple chairs amidst her works. By doing so, she offers the viewer a location from which to explore the unexpected view and the shifting of light around the room; a place from which to internally investigate a personal sense or pacing of the work as the exhibition title of "Lingering" would suggest. In her own words, Fleming is compelled to make visible the " the glimpse of the strangeness beyond the world to which we cling, opening a place where thought becomes tangible, history leaves a trace and information exhales form."

Linda Fleming attended the San Francisco Art Institute and Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. She has received numerous prestigious recognitions including those from the Peter S. Reed, Adolph & Ester Gottlieb and Pollack- Krasner foundations. Her work is in the permanent collections of the Berkeley Art Museum, Laumeier Sculpture Park, Oakland Museum, University of Wyoming, Stanford University Museum, and Albuquerque Museum along with many other collections both public and private. Fleming divides her time between the Bay Area, the Nevada desert and southern Colorado where she maintains a studio.