For much of his 40-year career as an artist, Jene Highstein has concentrated on variations of archetypal forms such as cones, cylinders and spheres. Coming of age in the 1970s, with its reappraisal of minimalist imperatives, he has worked with the pristinely geometric and the primordially biomorphic but most characteristically, his sculpture exists in the area between, alluding to both. Ultimately, however, he is more of a materialist – even a sensualist – than he is anything else…and has more in common with the classic modernism of Constantine Brancusi and Isamu Noguchi than with Donald Judd, or Sol Lewitt.

Highstein’s numerous projects include monumental sculptures, towers, pavilions and amphitheaters in both public and private spaces. In 2005, a group of his sculptures was exhibited in Madison Square Park, New York, sponsored by the Madison Square Park coalition. In 2003, Double Pipe Piece (1974) was installed at P.S. 1 MOMA. Highstein is included in the permanent collections of numerous museums among them: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Baltimore Museum of Art; the Dallas Art Museum; the Fogg Museum, Harvard University; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

Jene Highstein was born in Baltimore, MD in 1942. He received his BA in Philosophy at the University of Maryland in 1963, and attended the University of Chicago’s postgraduate program in Philosophy from 1963-1965. In 1970, he received a graduate degree from the Royal Academy of Art, London. Highstein lived and worked in New York, until his recent death in 2013.

Courtesy of Danese Corey