Clara Hali

Clara Hali's current exhibition at Defiance Gallery, "Land Forms Body Forms" is an encounter both with a modernist sculpture tradition made new, and with the body, in all its difficulties and pleasures.

Rendered any less quietly, the surfaces in Clara Hali’s Hip Hanger I might appear to slide across each other, or even to flit and slip, mercurially. Surface is abundant in this work, where five discrete forms – each something more complicated, and more multiple, than a perfect cube – jostle around a centre of gravity created by their own arrangement. We could trace any number of paths for the eye (or, in another world, the hand) to follow along the generous faces and the edges of these shapes – perhaps, indeed, we could imagine the entire piece as a continuous edge to race along. In this picture of things, the work asks us to see quickly. What such a picture excludes, however, is the fact of the bronze. 

Hali’s forms, throughout this exhibition, are deft and heavy in a way distinctly made possible by her choice of medium. Though elsewhere in her practice she works in wood carving, ceramics, and stone, Land Forms Body Forms exclusively showcases the capacity of bronze for a sort of eloquent reservedness. Many of her works figure portions of the body in movement, abstracted and likened to landscape as they may be: we have gestures towards hips, torsos, and bellies which stand austerely in their spaces. What is striking about these bodies is their weightiness in the world – both literally and in their finely balanced, deft declaration of themselves. Occupying three dimensional space with sure-footedness and deep certainty, these sculptures pull the body down into itself. They remind us that our joints so often strain and bear weight, that out muscles are soaked and solid. 

As several art historians have noted in recent years, Hali’s predecessors on the ground between figuration and pure form include many of the “heroes” of European modernist sculpture, and especially those who incorporated elements of cubism: Archipenko, Lipchitz, Zadkine, Derain, Picasso. It seems no accident that Hali’s work is set apart from this list by a focus on the feminine not just as subject matter but as a sensibility. Attention to the difficulty, the heaviness, the labour, and the delight of bodies – while of course not the exclusive territory of women, and in fact the remit of all artists who make work about bodies –  makes these works feel made from inside the body, rather than from the perspective of an observer. 

Hali, who has taught sculpture at the National Art School since 1988, and has travelled widely throughout her career, brings a sensitive, scholarly, and deeply felt body of work to the space at Defiance.

EXHIBITION 
Land Forms Body Forms
2 – 23 July 2022
Defiance Gallery, Sydney