Recently retired Chicago architect David Munson says his 17 sculptures at Roy Boyd “mix up the inside and the outside. There’s no sense of enclosure, and that would be very difficult to achieve in a building.” He says Elliptical Skeleton 1 was inspired by the spinal surgery his wife was undergoing: here wooden “ribs” are supported by a vertical steel tube at the center and connected with aircraft cable; rectangular wooden panels attached to the tube resemble vertebrae. Looking at this piece is like seeing the exterior and interior of a building at once.
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In a review, former gallery owner Paul Klein says Munson’s work suggests Vladimir Tatlin, and Munson agrees with this assessment of his pieces as constructivist. Certainly his exposed forms, geometrical shapes, and industrial materials recall this early-20th-century movement, while the tumbling stack of bunched half circles in Deconstructed Sphere is reminiscent of cubist paintings: eight pairs of red semicircles like lips are partly covered where the lips “open” with curved sheets of translucent acrylic. Munson had in mind cutting a sphere into sections, like the sections of an orange; the acrylic resembles teeth. Yellow Bas Relief 1, inspired by crop circles, is a wooden wall panel with cutout lines, curves, and holes whose edges sometimes jut out, creating a dizzying array of relief effects.
Munson and his wife had two children, a son and a daughter, in the 60s and moved to the suburbs in 1973. His son, Eric, after some scrapes in his early teens became a prizewinning BMX bicycle racer and eventually enrolled at IIT. Common interests drew father and son closer. “We would have conversations about design problems,” Munson recalls. After graduation, his son started his own business making custom furniture of steel and stained wood. Only a few years later, at 27, Eric died in his sleep of an undiagnosed heart defect. Munson says he was devastated but began to include elements from Eric’s work, such as its characteristic curves, in his buildings. He mentions as an example a large canopy over the front entrance of the CSU student union that’s made out of curved steel tubing and glass panels.
When: Through February 8
