Richard Stankiewicz lived next to a scrap yard when he was a child and often made toys for himself from the random materials he found there. After studying painting in New York and sculpture in Paris, Stankiewicz returned to “junk” in 1951, creating the first of his welded steel sculptures from pieces of scrap metal he unearthed while converting his back yard into a garden. During the 1950s, Stankiewicz assembled fragments of old boiler tanks, chains, wire, machine parts, and other discarded metal objects into bizarre, often humorous “people.” Turning to more formal, abstract forms in the 1960s, he eventually abandoned junk in favor of prefabricated industrial components such as plate steel, I-beams, angle irons, and pipe. Shortly before his death in 1983, the artist began to reintroduce both found materials and representation into his works. In this piece in the Garden, the last large-scale sculpture he produced, Stankiewicz welded together hoops and pipes to create an elegantly linear form that suggests a giant, weedy tuft of grass.
© 1998 Walker Art Center