Bakalar’s conscious and subconscious amalgamation of the methodology of scientific inquiry, technological constructs, and a visual vocabulary derived from geometry and the binary code has resulted in a body of work that propels itself into our reality. His Icons, in particular, demonstrate Bakalar’s strongest affinities—formalistic precisionism and surreal illusion.
Joan Loria, MIT Museum
David Bakalar’s strong grounding in the sciences and his continuing interest in their relationship to man, have made him eminently equipped to reflect and visually comment upon that relationship. With both the Helical Man Series and the Computer Man Series, Bakalar has creates icons for the 21st century.
The Computer Man sculptures are a logical extension of Bakalar’s representation of Helical Man and his interest in man’s inner workings related to external form. The computer men may be interpreted as man’s reaction to his increasingly complex, computerized, technological world.
With the Helical Man Series, Bakalar expresses in visual terms the relationship between external and internal man: man’s surface as exposed to his genetic makeup. Visually, the form of man and the helix blend, creating confusion as to where one ends and the other begins.
Paul F. Rovetti
Director, The William Benton Museum of Art
David Bakalar’s Helical Man Series represents a fresh initiative in a now vulnerable twentieth-century tradition of marrying abstract art with contemporary technology and a dynamic psychology of perception.
While his debt to the structural forms and industrial references of Gabo, Pevsner and the classical Russian Constructivists is clear and acknowledged, Bakalar focuses on contemporary issues of genetics and the DNA helix. Within assisted photography, he has given a new human dimension to an otherwise coldly irrational art of geometric abstraction.
Sam Hunter
Professor Emeritus, Princeton University
Bakalar’s art has a new look but is also influenced by the art of antiquity, which in the twentieth century is perceived in all the sharpness of generalization. His art relates both to the art of inventions of modern civilization and to the monuments of the ancients, but seen anew.
A comparison of Bakalar’s best works with the greatest polished granite art of Egypt shows a deep understanding of the essence of these ancient statues. The tension of form concentrated in them from within is especially close to Bakalar, and he succeeds in following their great example in his stone work.
In his works with metal components of convex and concave surfaces, he uses the reflection of the sky and the earth—these fragments of the landscape, themselves supporting the cold radiance of light.
Tatyana B. Manturova
Head, Department of Sculpture
The State Russian Museum
A QUANTUM LADY
COMPUTER MAN III
HELICAL MAN
TV MAN