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David Borgerding
I'm always looking at work I've done before and modifying forms that are dear to me-using them in different ways, letting them speak some more.
David Borgerding was born in Grand Rapids Michigan. Inheriting a passion for “making things” from his father and learning to weld at the age of 14 surely charted the course for Borgerding’s future in the arts. After receiving a BFA in sculpture from Kendall College of Art and Design, Borgerding continued his studies at the Savannah College of Art and Design. David Borgerding enjoys working on a wide range of scales, from tabletop pieces to garden-scale outdoor sculpture. Within this impressive range, sculpture is combined by the artist's intuitive gifts to create evocative forms.
Upon completing his MFA at SCAD in 2000, he moved to New Orleans, and continued to study sculpture but began focusing on abstract, organic, and fabricated bronze pieces. In 2008, he built his current metal studio, located in the Irish Channel neighborhood of New Orleans. Intensely active in the studio, David works on large, public and private commissions as well as smaller pedestal sized sculptures. He is the recipient of two grants from the Joan Mitchell Foundation and has exhibited nationally and internationally, appearing in noted private, corporate, and institutional collections.
David Borgerding's sculptures combine intrinsic planning and detail with a sense of spontaneity, lyricism and freedom. Each sculpture begins as a series of loose sketches, followed by a cardboard model when the composition is fully formed.David Borgerding crafts the copper pieces into seamless forms, often contrasted with broad horizontal expansions and dynamic vertical rises. They arch and protrude with elegant calligraphic lines that seem to translate the gestural vigor of Abstract Expressionist painting into three-dimensional space. Despite the need to meticulously address this issue in the creation of each piece, the final works are light, rhythmic, and joyful.
Borgerding's sculptures are visually allusive but not literal. They evoke from the viewer what British art critic Clive Bell called"aesthetic emotion," a deep-seated response to formal properties of line, form, and color. These responses are transcultural, impacting viewers independently of thematic, emotional, or experiential context; therein lies their elemental power. They are, as Bell holds, vehicles toward nothing less than "aesthetic exaltation," through which we find ourselves "lifted above the stream of life."
In Borgerding's compositions, shapes interact in ways that tug at this fundamental capacity to arouse ecstatic experience. Often, the sculptures are strikingly cantilevered. Sometimes component shapes join together at fulcrums so small, the sculptures seem to defy the laws of gravity. When viewed from different angles, the profile of each work changes, lending an uncanny, ethereal quality and creating an ever-changing experience for the viewer.
- Art: David Borgerding