Precarious Sculptures Show The Human Face At Its Most Abstract

With his abstract visages, Wilfrid Wood tries to bridge the gap between graphics and sculpture. If you take a look at Wilfrid Wood’s website, it’s clear that the sculptor has the chops for realism, or at least something approaching it. Wood’s clay likenesses of Sir Paul McCartney and footballer Wayne Rooney are identifiable even on a quick scroll-by. But if the ex-Beatle’s hangdog jowls betray their maker’s eye for particulars--the key quality or two that make a famous face so familiar--another subset of his work exhibits an interest in the more universal aspects of the human visage. Each of Wood’s abstract face sculptures has two eyes and a mouth, but that’s about where the similarities end. The pieces came out of a period in which Wood was trying to rethink his sculptural work in the context of the field in which he was trained: graphic d...