On September 4th, Craig Krull Gallery will open its sixth solo exhibition of Woods Davy’s sculptures. For the past thirty years Davy has worked with natural elements, usually incorporating various types of stone in fluid balancing acts that reflect the artist’s “Western Zen” sensibility. Art writer Shana Nys Dambrot wrote that Davy’s work is essentially a “kind of collaboration between artist and nature,” one in which the artist “prefers to cooperate with the pre-existing uniqueness and objecthood of his materials.” In the current body of work, entitled La Ascensión de las Piedras, Davy’s stone configurations suggest levitation-- as if the small boulders are just beginning a linked and gradual ascent. The forms are influenced by the artist’s underwater observations of natural elements growing towards the surface and sunlight. As Holly Myers remarked on Davy’s work, there is “something thrilling about a work that appears to defy its own natural properties,” while at the same time one can appreciate the work’s “meditative reverence.”

    Concurrently, the gallery will present an exhibition of collages by George Herms. Coming out of the Beat Generation of the 1950s, Herms is recognized -- along with Ed Kienholz, Wallace Berman and Bruce Conner -- as a leading figure of California Assemblage. His work combines aged, stained, and rusted detritus, always rubber stamped with the four letters, L-O-V-E (the E printed backwards). As the critic Robert L. Pincus observed, the stamps are “a linguistic hieroglyph, as it were, of his ambitions for art. Collective judgment deems ugly those things Herms recycles as beautiful. That restorative act, in some small way, is analogous to his hope, perhaps implausible and undoubtedly visionary, that art can serve as catalyst for purging the human heart of hate.” The collages in this exhibition are a result of Herms sifting through boxes of his papers that were being catalogued for the Getty Research Institute. The discarded envelopes, blank sheets of thin cardboard, and other scraps of mail were covered with patterns of pale brown and tan acid staining. Herms reassembled the “damaged” remains into subtle layers of tone and shape, which sometimes include a gallery return address or the void of an envelope window.