General
Jackie Winsor, 82, Dies; Sculptor Who Hammered, Drilled and Chopped
She gave complexity to simple shapes, drawing inspiration from her rugged Canadian upbringing. In her downtime, she swung on a trapeze.
Jackie Winsor, a Canadian-born American sculptor who animated the coolly masculine and factory-polished surfaces of minimalism with a sense of new life, coaxed from natural materials like fiber, wooden logs and thick, bristly rope, died on Monday in Manhattan. She was 82.
Her death, in a hospital, came after a severe stroke and a brain hemorrhage, according to her niece Jackie Brogna.
A leading figure on the New York art scene, Ms. Winsor was the first female sculptor to be given a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. She was acclaimed as a post-minimalist, an overly broad label that can refer to most any artist who arrived on the scene in the late 1960s and bemoaned the severity of minimalist reduction.
Ms. Winsor quickly distinguished herself from the pack. In contrast to Donald Judd, her neighbor in the SoHo neighborhood of Manhattan, who outsourced much of his work to industrial fabricators, Ms. Winsor could typically be found in her studio creating enigmatic, obsessively crafted objects. She hammered, drilled, coiled yards of heavy rope and chopped up plywood with a firefighter’s hatchet.
She was neither prolific nor attention-seeking. She worked at a slow pace and seldom made more than three medium- to large-size sculptures a year. Critics trying to describe her process often reached for old-timey metaphors. She was compared to “a Yankee pioneer” and to her seafaring Canadian ancestors, whose ships would be tethered to docks with thick ropes.
She was probably best known for “Bound Square” (1972), a seemingly simple form rife with subtle poetry. At first it looks like nothing so much as a humongous picture frame, measuring about 6 feet by 6 feet, for a family of giants. Composed of four long wooden logs that are secured at the corners with bulbous, tightly wrapped twine, it leans against a wall when displayed at the Museum of Modern Art, as if awaiting an installation crew. It can put one in mind of old bones and joints — even swollen, arthritic joints — but also evoke the satisfaction that comes from holding a body in balance.
