HENRY KLIMOWITCZ

Make a mental list of the most boring, basic objects and materials from your everyday life, and you’ll soon arrive at cardboard boxes. But in the hamlet of Boston Corners in upstate New York, the Wisconsin-born artist Henry Klimowicz has spent 16 years gathering hundreds of them for his art.

There, in a tall, old dairy barn he converted into his home and studio, he cuts, pulls, twists, braids, and weaves pieces of the brown material into flat mandalic circles or spirals and other subtly organic shapes, which he hangs against the wall or suspends from the ceiling. Deceptively delicate, with ornate surfaces that belie their durable foundations, the works are sometimes reminiscent of such natural phenomena as waterfalls, while others suggest fish or underwater plants, trees, shields, clouds, maps, fishing nets, and landscapes. Occasionally, he even takes cues from art history, as in the five-part 2009 work Rectangles 1-5, whose frames of tree limbs and drapery were inspired by Rodin’s sculpture The Burghers of Calais.

“I love it when as humble a material as cardboard can be made to cut through its cultural confines,” Klimowicz says. “The work is positive because it moves from trash to beauty.” Inside his barn, utility knives, glue guns, and industrial wire cover the tables where he works, while the walls—interrupted by stalls that once housed cows—are hung with his lacy yet imposing pieces, the largest of which measure 20 feet across and use five miles of cardboard strips. He procures many of his supplies from a local provider: the lumber and millwork company Ed Herrington Inc., which saves packing materials for him.

Klimowicz has been working with cardboard since 1986, when he moved to New York after graduating from the Uni- versity of Wisconsin–Milwaukee and from Skowhegan, a summer residency program in Maine. “I wanted to have full ownership of what I worked with,” he says, “and I was living in a small apartment in Brooklyn. Cardboard was all I could fit in there.” He also credits his family heritage with the inspiration for his signature tech- nique, noting that his great-aunt Molly Nye Tobey was a “fairly famous” rug weaver in the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s.

 

In recent years, Klimowicz has maintained a connection to his local art community, exhibiting his work at the Wassaic Project, a young, funky art collective located down Route 22 from Boston Corners. At Morrison Gallery, in Kent, Connecticut, his works sell for $500 for a very small piece to $40,000 for large installations, though most are in the $10,000 range.

 

Three years ago, he decided to use his barn’s high ceilings and open spaces as a non-commercial gallery space for local artists to show their work, and named it the Re Institute. “This is a very pleasant place to be as an artist,” he says, gesturing toward the rough-hewn walls around him. Of his chosen technique, he says, “it’s like coal mining—as long as the vein is good, you keep following it. There are so many ways of handling and shaping this material. You get a kind of redemptive residue from the work.” —Celia McGee