Arlene Shechet is a sculptor living and working in New York City and the Hudson Valley. Defying easy categorisation, Shechet creates contradictory and dynamic works, fluctuating between the organic and the architectural whilst pushing the boundaries of ceramic sculpture.
All at Once, a major, critically-acclaimed 20-year survey of Shechet’s work was on view at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston in 2015. In a review of the exhibition, Sebastian Smee of The Boston Globe wrote: “It’s in the harmonies and tensions between these colors and textures, between suggestions of both order and anarchy, decay and blooming freshness, that these works cough, sputter, and sing. If they really are the great analogs to interior life that I feel them to be, it’s because Shechet knows that this life, expertly attended to, has its own folds and wrinkles, its own hollows and protuberances; that it is at once fugitive and monumental … and ultimately unknowable.” All at Once was also hailed by The New York Times as “some of the most imaginative American sculpture of the past 20 years, and some of the most radically personal.”