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Nearly 50 years after Charles Ross began running on “Star Axis,” the artist’s gigantic paintings in the New Mexico desert are about to be completed.
By Nancy Hass
In TRAVERS L’HIVER, Charles Ross’s lifestyle belongs to a New York-established multimedia artist of a bound harvest: the whitewashed SoHo loft with a comfortable studio on the back; a pair of soft, hairy dogs that he and his wife, the painter Jill O’Bryan, walk down Wooster Street in a cool place, opposite the windows of the wrought-iron branches that were little more than scrap when it first arrived. In the mid-1960s, after reading mathematics and sculpture at the University of California, Berkeley, they are now chanel and Dior outposts. In the evening, stop by one or two galleries in Chelsea, then stay for dinner at Omen, the Position of Japanese Food that has been on Thompson Street since the 1980s, nodding the stalwart of a city scene that ate his decades of young Americans. apass: the recontractor Alex Katz, 92, has a sake with the expressionist summary David Salle, 67; musician Laurie Anderson, 73, at the bar, with his hair bristling with gray.
But at dawn in April, when the elements began to break, those external symptoms suddenly disappeared. A long flight and a bumpy trip 3 hours later in the bruised, encrusted red clay Dodge Dakota, which continues to be the best friend in a long-term parking lot at Albuquerque Airport, Ross and O’Bryan are halfway through a steep table. at the base of “Star Axis”, the 11-story observatory in sandstone, bronze, earth, granite and stainless metal at which Ross, one of the last prestigious men of the generation of so-called earthmoving artists, worked every day since he designed it in 1971. After all, it will be completed, wait, by the end of 2022. He’ll be 8 years old. “When I’m in New York, ” he said. “I’m just waiting.”
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