Reviews
THE NEW CRITERION
July 20, 2021
“After the Mobile” is an apt subtitle for Tim Prentice’s exhibition at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Organized by Richard Klein, The Aldrich’s exhibitions director, the two-part solo show reveals the architect-sculptor’s lifelong homage to the work of Alexander Calder, whose kinetic art Marcel Duchamp first described as “mobile” (while Jean Arp likewise called Calder’s static sculpture “stabile”). Prentice both follows Calder’s example and examines what comes next. With intricate, handmade work of paper and wire, Prentice and his longtime collaborator David Colbert, draw in space, allowing their sculpture’s environment to complete the picture. The effects of movement are intimately felt as these works ripple and weave in mesmerizing mobility. —JP
ART IN AMERICA
October 2004
“Tim Prentice at Maxwell Davidson”
“Facades and Fragments,” Tim Prentice’s exhibition at Maxwell Davidson, contained a large selection of his kinetic sculpture from the past six years, with an emphasis on works from 2003. Prentice uses aluminum, stainless steel and occasionally Lexan, which is extraordinarily delicate and almost ephemeral in appearance. The constituent parts must be sufficiently thin and light to allow a gentle breeze to stir them. In mobiles hung from the ceiling or in wall works, the artist repeats identical silvery or semitranslucent forms in one or more registers, thereby touching upon ideas having to do with seriality, systems, symmetry and pattern. The works give rise to a remarkable range of scintillating and fleeting light impressions, as well as issuing mellifluous and crystalline sounds that are quite soothing….
Prentice’s sculptures, so responsive to transformations in the light and air surrounding them, are about fluid movement and change, reminding us that everything is in flux. Though perfectly abstract in appearance and made of materials associated with industry and technology, these constructions manage to highlight the rhythms of nature. Wonders of engineering, they create evanescent drawings in thin air. —Michael Amy
ARTistic FX Magazine, June-July 2004, Vol. 3 Issue 6
The New York Times: January 28, 2000
A former architect, Tim Prentice makes kinetic stainless steel and aluminum sculptures, which are sleek, whimsical contraptions in a modernist mode. They owe the obvious debt to Calder and George Rickey, although as feats of imaginary engineering linked to a machine aesthetic, they are related to the work of earlier figures like Tatlin and to various Machine Age artists of the 1920’s and 30’s, and in their use of simple, repeating, industrial forms they even bring to mind Minimalism. (more)
Michael Kimmelman
The New York Times, January 28, 2000
Not only in terms of number of pieces but also because of his powers of invention, Tim Prentice dominates the exhibition.
William Zimmer,
The New York Times, February 21, 1999
Of all the artists I’ve seen in this setting, Prentice is the one who is the most effective, because he collaborates with the landscape rather than ignoring it.
Christine Temin,
The Boston Globe, July 28, 1994
Tim Prentice, one of the most imaginative and poetic sculptors practicing today, contrived from industrial materials three airy circles—floating lines in space—that he suspended in the woods. Balancing them so that “the wind endlessly (can) draw and redraw the lines in a continuous flow of patterns without ever repeating itself,” he created an effect of mystery and wonder.
The Sunday Republican,
July 29, 1990
Playful and ebullient, Tim Prentice’s mobiles of stainless steel and lexan—an esoteric plastic used in space shuttles—achieve a magic choreography.
Margaret Sheffield,
Review, February 1, 1997
Prentice’s curtains of fluttering tiny metal square and dangling wire are so instantly appealing—gentle, dreamy, even beautiful, their shiny surfaces a veritable dance of scintillating reflections in the sunlight.
Sculpture, May 2001
Experiencing Tim Prentice’s work is like taking a ride on a roller coaster: it is impossible to describe it in words or appreciate in a still photograph. One must experience the kinetic movement, feel the soar, the ruffle, the shift and follow that action over time before one can really understand his intent.
Catalog of the Connecticut Biennial, June 25, 1989
