Musical Lines In My Hands:

For Tampa-based sculptor Dominique Labauvie, steel provides the perfect medium for the exploration of the gesture in space. As part of a sculptural tradition that includes Alexander Calder and David Smith, Labauvie’s sculpture celebrates the purity of the material in a non-narrative and non-representational manner. The act of forging and shaping metal harkens back to the origins of the relationship between the sculptor and his material.
 
The artist combines this modernist sensibility with a musical awareness. The title of the show Musical Lines in My Hand refers to the primacy that music and its performance has in the heart and mind of the artist. In his site-specific work Suspended Skylines, the artist reconciles the more literal form of a musical register with the abstracted impression of the skyline of Tampa.  The lines of the sculpture react to the surroundings, similar to musical notes of a composition; creating a temporal sequence, leading to a time/space relationship. The differentiation between the marks on a musical score and the subsequent sound that is made when these marks are performed provide a complex system of form and interpretation. This system is parallel to the resonance created by the relationship of the artist to his material and process.
 
Labauvie’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. He has been commissioned to execute large-scale public works in France for the cities of Paris, Draveil, Valence, Dijon, Livry-Gargan and Reims and as well as in Tampa. In 2009, he was the recipient of an Individual Support Grant from the prestigious Adolph and Esther Gottlieb Foundation. His work is included in many private and public collections nationally and internationally. Mr. Labauvie was born in 1948 in Strasbourg, France, worked in Paris from 1969 and moved to Tampa in 1998.
 
The museum will publish a catalogue commemorating this partnership later this fall. Generous support for the catalogue has been provided by Greg and Anne Yadley, Haim Chanin Fine Art, Mr. Stanton Storer, Janice and Stephen Van Dyck, Dr. Paul and Liz Phillips, and Central Art Supply.