Ian Dawson’s plastic sculptures -- usually comprised of cheap, brightly colored plastic furniture and storage containers melted into bizarre, evocative shapes -- are peerless examples of a type of abstract art that abandons all received notions of form, content, and context. And while the original plastic objects have been transformed so completely as to be ultimately unrecognizable, the resulting artwork always bears the evidence of Dawson’s extremely energetic and highly physical aesthetic process. The artist’s wild conglomerations -- brilliant, melted mountains of color -- possess and impart a pure visual power not unlike the work of earlier Abstract Expressionist painters like Jackson Pollock and mark Rothko. Dawson’s deft handling of his blowtorch -- picture a radically updated sculptor’s hammer and chisel -- produces graceful protrusions, frozen swirls, and tightly controlled chaos, allowing the artist to instill the synthetic material with incongruously biomorphic forms and the suggestion of organic activity.

2000, Beta (Blue/Orange), plastic, 56 x 33 x 23”

2000,#199, plastic, 75 x 144 x 145cm

2000, Untitled, plastic

Ian Dawson