Tools As Art: The Hechinger Collection

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F.L. Wall, One Room Efficiency, 1979
ash, cherry, mahogany
66 x 22 x 10 in.

F.L. Wall was born in Dover, Delaware, in 1947. He received a B.A. from the University of Delaware in 1969. From 1978 to 1982 he participated in workshops and seminars with Sam Maloof, Robert Whitley, and James Krenov. He also studied sculpture at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1980-81. Wall started his career restoring antiques and building eighteenth-century reproductions in Williamsburg, Virginia. He eventually began designing his own furniture, which was inspired by the Scottish Arts and Crafts artist Charles Rennie Mackintosh and the twentieth-century Japanese-American wood master George Nakashima. In 1975 he began to carve a series of overscale, recognizable objects, such as tools and a gas pump, in wood. While their play with scale and medium recalled the Dadaist experiments of Man Ray and the work of Pop artist Claes Oldenburg, their exquisite craftsmanship encouraged viewers to see the inherent beauty of their shapes and materials. Since 1979 he has exhibited his work widely, including shows at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Gallery of Functional Art in Santa Monica, California. Humor and surprise continue to be guiding elements in his more recent work, which includes purely sculptural pieces. The latter range from abstracted chair forms to tabletop sculptures that incorporate various woods and steel and function as three-demensional still lifes.