Press Quotes
"McDonnell's sculptures compete with the work of some of the best-known sculptures of our time. Tough competition, indeed. McDonnell's work in its richly unfolding complexity and strength more than holds its own."
Andre Emmerich
Director, Andre Emmerich Gallery (ret.) - NYC
"Joseph McDonnell is clearly a master of what might be called late modern sculpture - cubist/constructivist complexity and an expressionistic sense of drama... They [his sculptures] are about faith in the possibility of perfection in an imperfect and unperfectable world. They are about the second coming of paradise after the apocalypse."
Donald Kuspit
Art Critic & Professor, Stony Brook University - NY
"His work is captivating and joyful. Overall one realizes that after having studied academically, McDonnell succeeds in resolving, with fine originality, the difficult problems of space in his very distinct and synthesized forms."
La Nazione
"J. McDonnell presents a most interesting series of statues in wood, which show an uncommon versatility, a living sensitivity, and great intuitional finesse. He has a vital sense of mass and space that he employs with fluid movements and penetrations. In all his work there is the vibrant light of his own personality, the sign of the true spirit of an artist."
Giornale de Mattino
"This artist has deserted neo-classicism to perfect and purify, with full success, his forms. I like his work best when he abandons the songs and sentiments of others as especially demonstrated in his Madonna and Child and Dove, truly a tiny masterpiece."
Il Telegrafo
"The ice form McDonnell appropriated for his art is the straightforward, quotidian one of the basic ice cube, transfigured into piled-up giant blocks, adhering to each other like the strands of DNA model. Their structured assemblies have an inner logic and sense of inevitability that parallel the powers of organic, living forms - and yet they are suffused with the unique spirit and hand which McDonnell brings to the sculpture. These sculptures also capture light, which is refracted throughout each work's cubic cells. The quality of the surrounding light further infuses each sculpture with a changing spectrum of colors as daylight changes to lamplight and back again."
Andre Emmerich
Director, Andre Emmerich Gallery (ret.) - NYC
"A single piece of Joseph McDonnell's work suggests the potential of a multiplicity of possible combinations and permutations of form. His sculptures exist like Rubik's Cubes, providing but one solution to a myriad of outcomes and implying patterns of manipulation - of imaginatively moving through the steps of a puzzle. Within this set of relationships, his work quite naturally evolves through a progression of pieces, such as the Locking Piece Series, exploring a variety of solutions to a set of circumstances. Within his framework, rather than an enclosed static form, his work provides a sensation of an internal force - a magnetic movement. McDonnell's sculptures are internalized; they are anchored by their central constructs. Rather than expanding into our surroundings, they turn in upon themselves and draw us into their environment. Essentially these works tend to take on a liberated life of their own, yet, unlike the self-centered objects of minimalism, they are not so heavily weighted as they are well intended - like a good friend."
Christopher Youngs
Director, Freedman Gallery - Reading, PA