P.S.1 Installation part of "Building Structures"
       
      The New York Sun
December 5, 2002
By
Daniel Kunitz
     

The hot metaphor for curators and young artists is not, as it once was, the body or equality or race, but architecture. This past summer, the New Museum gave us a show in which artists used a variety of media to explore "Fictional Architectural Spaces," and the current drawing show at MOMA Queens devotes at least three sections to broadly architectural themes. "Building Structures," at P.S.1, completes the triangle with an exhibition of sculptures by artists "who re-stage the context and principles of architectural techniques."...

...The stacks and structures of dense, rough-hewn, white plaster in Karlis Rekevics' large untitled sculpture provide a counterweight to the ephemera of the Styrofoam artists. And Mr. Rekevics is one of the few artists included who actually redeploys architectural materials in a new context, in this case a sort of blasted building. Slabs of plaster accumulate beneath a structure of imposing plaster walls supported by wooden beams. Next to this structure, the artist has erected a tall, freestanding, triangular piece of plaster, a fragment of a ruin, perhaps, or a stand-in for public art; nearby two fluorescent light tubes attached to wood beams form a lonely street lamp.

...the brute presence of the work and pleasure Mr. Rekevics takes in raw industrial materials invite comparison with Richard Serra's enormously influential sculptures...

       
      "Partisan Review"
Winter 2003 Volume LXX, Number 1

By Karen Wilkin
      "...Another standout, the most inventive and most fully sculptural work in Building Structures, both formally and in terms of making the physical character of materials expressive, was newcomer Karlis Rekevics's installation in plaster and wood. A casual-seeming stack of plaster slabs, some unexpectedly swollen and notched vertical walls, and a couple of strategically placed light bulbs became a metaphorical distillation of the least romantic aspects of urban place, transformed by a simultaneously sensuous, rough material palette. Rekevics is someone to watch with attention."