BIOGRAPHY
"My style of sculpture represents the movement known as Modular Constructivism, which grew into its maturity and popularity in the 50's and 60's." - Norman Carlberg
Born in 1928 in Roseau, Minnesota, Norman Carlberg has received international acclaim. He studied at the Minneapolis School of Art and University of Illinois, followed by Yale University after Josef Albers met with Carlberg and looked at his advertising work done while serving in the Air Force from 1951 to 1955, and got him into Yale. Immediately thereafter, Albers left for Europe, leaving a strong influence behind at Yale; Albers was world-renowned and had studied and taught at the Bauhaus in Germany prior to his Yale tenure. Carlberg was appointed instructor in Sculpture at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture from 1957-58, and became Assistant Instructor in Design from 1958-59 while pursuing his Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Fine Arts there.
It was at Yale that Carlberg's fine arts colleague Irwin Hauer introduced the concept of design units, or modules, to him. Carlberg has identified his style of sculpture as Modular Constructivism, which grew into its maturity and popularity in the 50's and 60's. Carlberg was for the most part a Minimalist sculptor, concerned with the formal above almost all else, executed with a deliberate process: "I felt a part of a group that (was devoted to) a kind of formal, critical thinking and was not very much at ease with thinking of art in other terms; you analysed, you looked at something, but you looked at it formally just for what it was and the message was almost always out of it." (Interview, Maryland Art Place, 1996). While a modular approach could lead one to assume that his sculptures are made of repetitive units, Baltimore Sun art critic John Dorsey asserts otherwise: "By varying not only the shape of the individual module but its scale (as well as the scale of the piece as well), its color, its bulk, its complexity and the way it interacts with other modules, Carlberg increases the interest of his work with each added sculpture." (John Dorsey, "Sculpture Benefits from Retrospective," Baltimore Sun, June 20, 1996)
After his work at Yale, Carlberg taught from 1960 to 1961 at Universidad Católica in Santiago, Chile, then took the position of director of the Rinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Institute College of Art in 1961. He remained at MICA for 35 years.
Sculpturally, Carlberg worked in brass, plaster, and steel. Carlberg works by making objects, with some preliminary sketching, if any. He also produced prints as well as photographs of city details he found sculpturally interesting, such as concrete columns, "ribbons of freeways that float," and textures of dirt and rocks on the ground. (Interview, 1996) A number of his photographs, including one entitled Jones Falls Expressway (1993), have received critical acclaim and recognition for their expressionistic as well as formal attrubutes. He produced collages in 1972 while in Chile on sabbatical from MICA of which he wrote, "I think that many of the forms that I make are very formal but I find (them) very sensuous," adding, "I think that both of these, the formalism in the sculpture and the eroticism and such in the collages both reflect my interests. One cannot be the other - there wasn't a form that could be both." (Interview, 1996)
Carlberg's work was shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1959 in a show entitled, "Recent Sculpture USA." He has a few pieces in collections in Australia done in collaboration with Harry Siedler, and his work is in the permanent collections of the Addison Gallery of American Art at the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, New York, the Art and Architecture Gallery at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the Hirshhorn Museum, the Guggenheim Museum and The Baltimore Museum of Art. The Rouse Company, based in Columbia, Maryland, also holds his work. Commissions include a modular screen at the lobby of Baltimore City Hospital and a massive modular column for Northern Parkway Junior High School. He had a retrospective exhibition in 1996 at Maryland Art Place which exhibited his work in prints, sculpture and photography, and which celebrated the centennial of MICA's Rinehart School of Sculpture.
