Sculpture dominates Cedarburg Art Museum’s summer landscape

Cedarburg – The Cedarburg Art Museum’s third annual outdoor sculpture exhibition Fluid Forms takes advantage of the spaces surrounding Cedarburg’s historic Wittenberg-Jochem mansion to showcase the large-scale forms of Wisconsin sculptors Dennis Heimbach and David Valentine. The Cedarburg Art Museum’s outdoor exhibition was curated by Tom Lidtke and is made possible by support from Flagstone Landscape Design, Cedarburg.

Both Heimbach and Valentine came to creating large-scale sculpture from other career paths.  Long before Heimbach of Middleton, Wisconsin considered himself a sculptor, he won first place in the Fisher Auto Body Craftsman Guild Awards for a futuristic automobile design. For many years Heimbach had a career as a creative jeweler in Madison, WI and in retirement took up large-scale sculpture.  His pieces have highly polished finishes in stainless steel and have a sense of movement that extends beyond the piece itself. Heimbach’s sculptural pieces are in numerous public and private collections across the country, including at the Reston Town Center in Reston, Virginia, in the City of Greenville, South Carolina, at the S.C. Johnson & Son in Racine, Wisconsin and at Pfizer, Inc. in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

Valentine of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin is an award-winning architect who has extended his creativity into sculpture since 2005.  For Valentine, sculpture and architecture are inextricably connected. As in his architecture, Valentine’s sculpture hinges on spatial relationships, often incorporating a focal point and negative space to demonstrate these relationships. Although Valentine’s works are abstract they are rooted in concepts that are conveyed in the titles. His sculptures naturally oxidize with exposure to the elements, giving them an industrial quality. His works all suggest a sense of movement, whether it be movement that may be perceived beyond the physical sculpture or that implies orbit as part of the sculpture.

Image above: Dennis Heimbach’s Windtwist is a sculptural work in a highly polished stainless steel that exudes energy beyond the space that it occupies.

The exhibition Fluid Forms: The Sculpture of Dennis Heimbach and David Valentine may be viewed in daylight hours every day through September 19 on the Cedarburg Art Museum grounds at W63 N675 Washington Avenue. 

Image left: The Three of Us, a work in weathered steel and concrete by Sturgeon Bay sculptor and architect David Valentine, is part of Cedarburg Art Museum’s 2017 summer sculpture exhibition.