Belvedere at Hluboká: Let It Grow Again! Group exhibition featuring Rosemarie Castoro

Rosemarie Castoro's Forest of Threes (1977–78) will be on view as part of group exhibition Belvedere at Hluboká: Let It Grow Again!.

In the 1970s, Castoro began her experimentation into large, organically shaped sculptures. She worked on immersive installations of spiky groupings made from carved wood trunks, such as Forest of Threes (1977–78), whose title is a play on the similarity of the words ‘tree’ and ‘three’. The artist’s hand-whittled trees are arranged into trios with similarly playful individual titles, including Trees a Crowd, Tip Tickle and Tree Teeth. In her notes, Castoro describes how, while a visiting professor at Henderson Museum in Boulder, Colorado from 1976–77, ‘the tree returned to my consciousness and the shadow became more dimensional. Carving branches into sharpened, balanced stakes, they were a visual protection placed to warn me of intruders to my 2nd floor faculty apartment.’ When she returned to New York and began work on Forest of Threes, she used dead trunks and branches sourced locally from the Forestry Department in Central Park.

Simultaneously enticing and dangerous, the spiked forest offers protection to those encircled by it, forming a defensive barrier between them and the outside world. Much as Surrealist artist Max Ernst (1891–1976) before her, the allegory of the forest – with its ‘male’ components and ‘female’ entity – was an important one for Castoro, featuring in both her writings and sculptures. She wrote in her diary in the 1970s: ‘I am making a forest. It will crowd out anguish and misery. Structure comes from chaos, from quiet contemplation after engaging experiences...’ The installation in Forest of Threes appears structured to achieve a physical balance and yet the unique torque and bend of each spike gives the impression of movement, as if the branches could at any moment break into dance.