Old Friends Jane Manus

Manus JANE

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COVER: SASHA BLONDE, 2004

Manus JANE

PRESIDENT DEBORAH SPONDER

GALLERY DIRECTOR BEVERLY CUYLER

REGISTRAR CRISTIN LONGO

CURATOR ABBE SPONDER PREVOR

GALLERY ASSISTANT ALICE KOVALEVSKY ABOUT SPONDER GALLERY Deborah Sponder began her art career as a private dealer in California in 1983. Twenty years later, she joined her mother Elaine Baker in Boca Raton as a partner at Baker Sponder Gallery (est. 1989). In 2013, SPONDER GALLERY emerged with a strong presence in the international art fair circuit.

CONTRIBUTING WRITERS GABRIEL DELGADO

WWW.SPONDERGALLERY.COM

In the gallery’s 30 year history, we've offered a roster of established and mid-career artists and over 200 exhibitions of great quality and importance.

Notable one person exhibitions include Lynn Chadwick, Friedel Dzubas, Dan Christensen, Johan Creten, Michael Halsband, Jonathan Prince, Frank Stella, William King, Ernest Trova and Boaz Vaadia.

Artists who display innovative techniques and a unique approach to materials are paramount to the gallery's aesthetic such as Tigran Tsitoghdzyan, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, and Patrick Tagoe Turkson.

BY GABRIEL DELGADO

GEOMETRIC BRILLIANCE AND ENVIRONMENTAL SYNERGY

Manus’s approach is neither mimetic nor derivative. Rather, she foregrounds the potential for geometric abstraction to evoke emotion, memory, and a subtle anthropomorphism beneath the structural logic.

The exhibition Jane Manus: Old Friends, on view at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens from December 4, 2024 through June 2025, represents a critical moment in the evolving discourse between contemporary geometric abstraction and the cultivated wilderness of one of Florida’s most storied cultural landscapes.

As the new Artist in Residence, Manus engages in a dynamic interplay between structure and site, forging sculptural interventions that both contrast with and complement the gardens’ tropical splendor. Her vivid aluminum constructions offer not merely aesthetic delight but provoke a deeper meditation on form, material, and the relational capacities of sculpture in outdoor environments.

Rooted in the legacy of modernist formalism, Manus’s practice extends the vocabulary of Constructivist and Minimalist traditions into the present moment. Her compositions comprised of welded aluminum, painted in assertive chromatic palettes eschew figuration in favor of a rigorous, almost architectural spatiality. At the same time, they are marked by an exuberance that resists doctrinaire minimalism, gesturing instead toward a more playful and phenomenological engagement with space and perception.

Her works evoke antecedents in Anthony Caro, Beverly Pepper, and Anne Truitt, while asserting a distinctive voice shaped by feminist autonomy and the legacy of postmodern material experimentation.

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MANUS DISRUPTS THE CARTESIAN GRID WITH A GESTURE THAT IS BOTH PRECISE AND ANIMATED, EVOKING THE VISUAL TENSION FOUND IN DE STIJL COMPOSITIONS

Among the most compelling pieces in the exhibition is Lissa (2012), a monumental red sculpture fabricated in aluminum, measuring 102 x 31 x 40 inches. Positioned strategically near the historic Norton House, Lissa asserts its presence through angular propulsion and chromatic boldness. One diagonal beam thrusts outward in defiance of conventional verticality, creating a tension between mass and levitation, stability and motion. The piece engages in a dialectic with the surrounding natural elements; its linear austerity made all the more pronounced by the unruly foliage that frames it. Here, Manus disrupts the Cartesian grid with a gesture that is both precise and animated, evoking the visual tension found in De Stijl compositions yet animated by an unmistakably contemporary verve.

Elsewhere in the gardens, Sunrise emerges from a grove of palms like an apparition of playful modernity. This sculpture, painted in a radiant yellow, consists of interlocking rectangular forms that recall utilitarian objects, perhaps a chair, a scaffold, or a portal, but refuse easy identification. The work rewards ambulatory viewing, shifting in visual impact with each step, while casting complex shadows that function as temporary extensions of its form. These shadows, ephemeral and ever-changing, establish a second plane of abstraction, heightening the viewer’s awareness of time, light, and orientation in the landscape.

Perhaps the most architectonic of the assembled works is Endless, a pristine white sculpture whose vertical and horizontal planes intersect in a modular configuration that suggests both monumentality and porosity. With its open, cubed sections and glossy aluminum skin, Endless captures and reflects the ambient light, performing a choreography of brightness and shadow throughout the day. The work’s voids frame fragments of sky and garden, offering glimpses of the world beyond the sculpture while transforming that view into a curated visual event.

One might detect echoes of Le Corbusier’s spatial rationalism or even Donald Judd’s exploration of volume and transparency, yet Manus’s approach is neither mimetic nor derivative. Rather, she foregrounds the potential for geometric abstraction to evoke emotion, memory, and a subtle anthropomorphism beneath the structural logic.

Crucially, Manus’s intervention within the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens does not seek to dominate or overwrite the existing space. Instead, her sculptures participate in a kind of environmental synergy, aligning with the institution’s founding ethos to merge art, history, and horticulture. The selection of aluminum, industrial yet malleable, enduring yet light is key to this synergy. Manus’s manipulation of the material, rendered in electric hues and immaculately welded forms, reflects both technical mastery and a sensitive response to sitespecificity.

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As an Artist in Residence, Manus also contributes to an ongoing conversation about the role of sculpture in public and semi-public spheres. Her oft-cited assertion that “art should be brought into spaces of daily life” resonates deeply in this context. Old Friends reimagines the sculpture garden not as a repository of static objects, but as a living, interactive space where art acts as a conduit for reflection, play, and communal encounter.

In sum, Jane Manus: Old Friends stands as a testament to the enduring vitality of geometric

abstraction, particularly when situated within a dialogue with nature and history. Manus’s ability to transform industrial material into poetic form, to harmonize precision with spontaneity, and to activate landscape through sculptural intervention, ensures her position within the lineage of significant American sculptors.

This exhibition not only enriches the cultural offerings of the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens but also provides fertile ground for continued scholarly and public engagement with the evolving language of contemporary sculpture.

Jane Manus: Old Friends is on view through June 2025 at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens, located at 253 Barcelona Road in the historic El Cid neighborhood of West Palm Beach, Florida. The Gardens, founded in 1977 by sculptor Ann Weaver Norton, comprise two acres of rare palms, monumental sculpture, and the preserved home and studio of the artist. ***

FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT ANSG.ORG OR CALL 561-832-5328.

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