PUBLICATIONS/REVIEWS

2020
“COVID chronicles: On Artists in Lockdown” by Karen Wilkin. The New Criterion, September 2020

“The Art of FaceTime Portraiture” by Karen Wilkin. Wall Street Journal. June 2020

2015
Review: Greenwood Gardens Exhibition, Sculpture Magazine July/Aug

2013
“Amazing Outdoor Art in NYC: No Admission Fee Required” by Marisa Lascala, Conde Nast Traveler, August 9, 2013.

“Karlis Rekevics’ Sculpture Celebrates Staten Island’s Architectural History” by Vincenza Di Maggio Architectural Newspaper Blog, July 8, 2013.

2012
Ann Landi, “Auto-Destructive Tendencies” ARTnews, December 2012, pp.98-103
2009
“Hopkins Review”, Summer issue, cover
“Sculpture” , Sculpture Key West 2009 – review by Jan Garden Castro
Sculpture Key West 2009 – catalogue
2008
“EXIT Express” #36 May 2008 – article by Glenn Harper
Sculpture Key West 2008 catalogue
2007
“Sculpture” July/August 2007, Vol. 26 No. 6 – cover, article by Karen Wilkin
2006
“Art Review” Issue 05 November 2006 – review
The New York Times “Art in Review; Trace ” – review
The New York Sun “On the Threshold of Being” review
2×2 Show – catalogue, text by Karen Wilkin
2004
The New York Times “Art in Review; ‘Slouching Towards Bethlehem'” – review
Artcritical.com – review, Eric Gelber, assistant editor
2003
“Partisan Review,” Winter 2003 Volume LXX, Number 1 – review
2002
The New York Sun “Sculpting Architecture” – review
P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center Fall 2002 newsletter – review
Triangle Artists’ Workshop 1998 & 2000 – catalogue New York, NY
2000
Wright State Competition – brochure Dayton, OH

NEW YORK TIMES

…Karlis Rekevics, a 40-year-old sculptor who works in giant slabs of cast plaster, picked up a sledgehammer and prepared to store his work in the only way he saw possible: in little, tiny pieces. “I’m a very unprecious artist,” Mr. Rekevics said, before smashing his multi-ton sculpture to bits. “And I wanted to go out with a bang.

SCULPTURE MAGAZINE

…Rekevic’s recent installation at Lori Bookstein Gallery moved into slightly new territory. A group of arched forms clustered together, like a fractured arcade, extending a long, tipped section toward the viewer. The piece had a loose-jointed, animated quality, as if the configuration before us might change and its parts assume new relationships.
~BULWARKS VANITY an Installation at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
July/August 2007 Vol. 26 No. 6 article by Karen Wilkin

Sculpture Key West 2008 catalogue

In 2008, sculpture is a broad field and its boundaries are quite porous. Sculpture doesn’t “decorate” space, it takes up space. In fact, the best sculpture actually creates it;s own space or significantly alters the way we experience a place. Take for example, Karlis Rekevics’ Bastion, Affectation, Differences?: the semi-carnivalesque architectural structure posits fragmentary images of Key West. The white plaster forms are blank and unarticulated save for the impressions left by the molds in which they were cast. This gives the work a sense of absence.
~BASTION, AFFECTATION, DIFFERENCES?
Installation at Sculpture Key West 2008 2008 Catalogue article by Mary Ceruti, Executive Director of SculptureCenter

PARTISAN REVIEW

“…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.”
~P.S.1 Installation part of “Building Structures”
Winter 2003 Volume LXX, Number 1
By Karen Wilkin

ART REVIEW

…the two structures that make up Karlis Rekevics’s Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts? suggest the mournful bass line of brute power ebbing. Rekevics – perhaps the least well-known of the artists in the show, but one of the most talented sculptors working today – constructs living ruins. Here stand what may be two large sections of modern bridges or buildings (were they blown apart or left to disintegrate?), fragments of girders and blocks of stone all in cast plaster. Metal tubing holds some of the parts together; rows of light bulbs, some unseen, illuminate the structures. By now, the plaster limbs, bone white when installed, have been stained and smudged.
Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?
Installation at Whitney at Altria
Issue 05 November 2006
review by Daniel Kunitz

THE HUDSON REVIEW

For pure surprise, though, it was hard to equal the work of Karlis Rekevics, a New Yorker whose sculpture I have followed for some time… Rekevics’ enormous architectural construction, in plaster, began discretely enough, but soon started moving into the surrounding woods. It was, like all of this gifted young artist’s work, about time and urban experience, based on charcoal drawings done from memories of things glimpsed on the long drive from Brooklyn to Emma Lake. But among close-packed evergreens, in shifting light, the plaster beams and stacked slabs lost the urban resonance they had in, for example, Rekevics’ 2002 exhibition at PS1, with gritty Queens out the window. In the Northern woods, the piece became a temple, ”Adam’s hut in Paradise.” Startled by these associations, Rekevics constructed a lamppost and added a wash of cold bluish light to subvert the pastoral associations, which made the piece more mysterious.
Volume LVI, Number 4, Winter 2004
article by Karen Wilkin

THE VILLAGE VOICE
BULWARKS VANITY
an Installation at Lori Bookstein Fine Art
Best in Show: Take ‘Em to Church, February 23, 2007
by R.C. Baker

Karlis Rekevics
Leached of color save for some weepy brown stains, Rekevics’s plaster walls, girders, and beams feel like the forgotten corner of a plaza in some city of tomorrow that got stalled in the poured-concrete frenzy of the sixties. Yet there is a witty interplay between the curving walls and negative spaces of the girders, and the elements, arrayed in sets of three, speak to each other across the open areas of the installation. Artificial lights cast gloomy shadows up the wall and diffuse half-moon shapes onto the floor, a wan contrast of warm and cool. If you have someone you want to break up with, this might be the perfect setting.

EXIT Express
Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?
Installation at Whitney at Altria
La escultura y el mundo material, #36 Mayo 2008
article by Glenn Harper

Sculpture and the Material World
…Bringing together the impulses to “making” and “dwelling” by means of architectural form is another important aspect of contemporary sculpture. …. Karlis Rekevics evokes architecture in a more abstract and phenomenological fashion in gallery installations in suspended, unfinished form that refer to the Merzbau of Schwitters but also to the dissipated experience (both visual and visceral) of passing through the hybridized physical and cultural world today. There are numerous artists today working in unfinished construction materials, perhaps reversing the demolitions of Gordon Matta-Clark on the one hand and the cast interiors of Rachel Whiteread on another, but Rekevics creates plaster environments of a more poetic nature. Like Potrc, he is not reproducing or critiquing a built space; he is evoking an experience rather than making a literal construction…

artcritical.com
TRIANGLE RESIDENCY Installation in DUMBO, Brooklyn
June 2004
review by ERIC GELBER, assistant editor at artcritical.com

Karlis Rekevics is at the beginning of his career, and yet his work doesn’t bring to mind any other artist. His complex white plaster sculptures…are intuitively composed amalgamations of anonymous objects found in the urban landscape or other places the artist has visited throughout his life and products of his imagination and drawing process.
Rekevics is not interested in making replicas of the real, but in capturing the often ignored Spartan and ephemeral beauty of the non-commercial aspects of the urban landscape. Rekevics also self consciously includes billboard and sign shapes in his sculptures which are blank, missing what is essential to their being, the advertisement. The sculptures are therefore also concerned with the way the gaze of the pedestrian is manipulated by the systems we pass through in urban settings, how our eyes are drawn to certain things which we barely register on a conscious level. The invented forms and the forms closely based on real objects blend together. The viewer is placed in a quasi-real place that relates to the real, has an aura of the familiar, but also subtly diverges from it, and inevitably refers to itself.
…Rekevics sculpture is powerful because it is perception based. The sculptures are self referential but they constantly call to mind our everyday experience, and we begin to explore what was once invisible or ignored once we leave the exhibit.

NEW YORK SUN
Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?
Installation at Whitney at Altria
On the Threshold of Being, Sunday, July 6, 2006
review by Brice Brown

The wacky 18th-century idea of an architectural folly gets a 21st-century face lift in Karlis Rekevics’s “Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?” (2006), a work comprised of three large cast-plaster parts. Instead of crumbling Corinthian columns, Mr. Rekevics places around the sculpture court remnants of overlooked but ever-present industrial architectural elements – like the buttressing I-beams of a highway underpass. Bare lightbulbs attached like barnacles to the undersides of these structures add a skewed range of dirty off-whites to the color palatte. Mr. Rekevics’s sculptural triptych almost reads like words fallen out of a sentence, and he seems to be taking a cue from Matthew Barney’s myth-evoking petroleum installations.

P.S.1 Installation part of “Building Structures”
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…

NEW YORK TIMES
Veracity, Validity, Fabrication, Facts?
Installation at Whitney at Altria
Art in Review: Trace, Friday, August 18, 2006
review by Ken Johnson

For his massive white plaster sculptures, Karlis Rekevics takes casts from parts of old bridges, traffic dividers, signposts and other functional pieces of the urban landscape. He reassembles these parts in configurations that look almost but not quite functional, and he outfits them with rows of glowing light bulbs that enhance their spectral qualities.