Louis

- by DeWitt Godfrey

2016 - Louis
Sponsored by RAM Gallery

Inspired by natural forms like seashells and honeycombs, DeWitt Godfrey creates artworks that can be experienced from within as well as from without. Composed of intricately stacked steel ovals, this striking hive-like structure, titled Louis, engages viewers from afar, inviting them in to admire an interior dome that opens to the sky.

The hallmark of Godfrey’s sculptures are conical metal sections, which when multiplied and combined create works of placid organic beauty. These ovoid shapes give his work the uncanny ability to appear to change shape as light transforms their convex and concave surfaces. He often sets his sculptures within exterior settings—wedged between or against buildings, trees or cascading across open green space—though he also creates impressive stand-alone pieces like this one. Through the emphasis of negative space, the artist leaves his work open to the viewer, allowing one to walk through and around his sculpture.

Based in Hamilton, NY, Godfrey is a graduate of Yale and the Edinburgh College of Art and is currently a professor of art and art history at Colgate University. He has received awards and fellowships from the Henry Luce Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, and the Japan Foundation, among others. His works have been exhibited in galleries and public spaces around the world and across the United States and can be found in several private and public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Brooklyn Museum, the deCordova Museum and Sculpture Park, and Art OMI.

Louis was originally commissioned in 2016 for a prize competition in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it won the prize for Featured Public Project and was exhibited alongside a sculpture by the legendary artist Alexander Calder.

Measuring 22 ft. tall, 31 ft. long, and 22 ft. in diameter, Louis weighs in at 22,000 pounds, or roughly eleven tons. Though certainly large, this is far from Godfrey’s largest work. You’ll find even larger pieces by him on the west coast, where he recently installed a towering 40 ft.-tall sculpture called Beken in Alameda, CA, and in New England at the DeCordova Sculpture Park in Massachusetts, which is home to Lincoln, a sprawling mass of undulating cylinders that weighs 38,000 pounds and stretches 150 feet across the lawn of the park.