Since the mid-90s, Paul Kass has established a reputation as one of Chicago’s most idiosyncratic sculptors, blurring the physical and conceptual boundaries between sculpture and painting, the masculine and the feminine, the prosaic and the sublime. Using the hidden materials of the construction trades (drywall tape, sandpaper, joint compound) as well as the visible but banal materials from the domestic environment such as slipcover vinyl, Kass creates understated constructions whose ingenious and economic designs use the method of their constructions to contradict familiar perceptions. His work is a critical reinterpretation of post-Minimalism as he weaves, figuratively and literally, veiled social and cultural references into his formalist explorations of materials.

Dualities of the hidden and the exposed, vulnerability and protection are recurrent themes that Kass explores through a deconstruction of the modernist grid. His intuitive use of a soft geometry constructed from prickly materials provides a compelling dialogue, from the male perspective, with the seminal minimalist artist Eva Hesse whose own explorations of an organic vocabulary provided an alternative to the masculine hard edges of minimalist artists such as Donald Judd and Carl Andre. That Kass favors the intricate handwork of tearing, folding, stitching his mass produced utilitarian materials lends his work its unusual structure as he makes obsolete those familiar labels such as inside and outside, support and surface.

John Brunetti