An outdoor exhibition of Ilan Averbuch’s sculpture inaugurates the garden space at Nancy Hoffman Gallery, opening on July 7th and continuing through December 29th. The show includes sculpture spanning 20 years of time.

Two large works, “Being” (2000-2008) in which a steel airplane cockpit balances on a massive stone book and “The Loneliness of Queen Hatshepsut” (2008) in which a large wooden mast holds rows of boulder-scale pink granite stones strung on a lead wire like a necklace, are placed on large living room type tables—one wood, one steel, referencing domestic space with an impact that can only be called monumental. Like most of Averbuch’s sculptures, these pieces present a visual dichotomy, a modernistic push/pull, an interest in issues, universal and private.

Included also are two stone pieces entitled “The Court” and “My Three Lilies.” Each, created approximately 20 years ago, is carved of stone with a channel for water. “The Court,” a low lying square of large tooth-shape inter-connected verticals, has water that fills a trough in the square. With graceful suggestion of motion, Averbuch’s ‘Court” references kings and queens and regal enclosures of times gone by. “My Three Lilies,” flowers filled with water that traverses all petals, feels as if it might sway in the breezes of summer, defying the material.

Averbuch has received many public and private sculpture commissions, among them: Valley Metro Rail, Phoenix, Arizona; the campus of the University of Connecticut at Storrs; Rose Garden Arena Complex in Portland, Oregon; HP Corporation in Yehud, Israel; Fire Station #2, Tierra Verde, Florida; and public space in Stapleton, Colorado. At present he is completing works for Sound Transit, Tacoma, Washington’s light rail, and for a new park in Leawood, Kansas.