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The Philadelphia Inquirer, posted online Sunday July 10, 2011

Galleries: Fritz Dietel explores shapes of nature in paper sculptures

by Edith Newhall

Fritz Dietel, a Philadelphia sculptor known for his exacting work in wood, is showing his efforts in handmade paper for the first time and inaugurating Schmidt Dean Gallery's new digs on Chestnut Street.

As he was in his 2007 show of wood sculptures, Dietel is still exploring shapes from nature, but he has narrowed his focus in this particular body of work to forms derived from flower buds, seed pods, sea sponges, and other objects whose inner structures are somewhat revealed through their exteriors. His transition from wood to abaca paper, made from pulped fiber extracted from the trunk of the banana tree Musa textilis, has enabled him to create a translucent, podlike skin over a hidden inner armature. (A 2007 Pew grant enabled Dietel to learn the art of papermaking).

When I think of Dietel's wood sculptures from four years ago, I think of perfectly finished pieces, not a cut out of place, and in some cases even overly finessed. Not so this time around. Dietel has allowed his paper pieces to suggest the distressing that weather, birds, and insects can exact on seedpods, buds, and berries, allowing the occasional tear or hole to remain exposed. It's hard for a perfectionist to allow nature in, one would think, and the artist clearly has decided to go with the flow.

A few of Dietel's more literal interpretations of nature in his last show of all-wood sculptures here veered into humor, referencing on occasion a cuckoo-clock kitsch. In this new paper work, however, he seems engaged in a more profound appreciation of nature and its naturally abstract patterns, and sculptures such as Chalice, a pink-tinged, puffed-up abacá pod emerging from a spiky mahogany base, and Smithsonian, a peach-stone shape encased in an open, netlike paper skin, bring to mind individual elements of Charles Burchfield's late, revelatory paintings rendered as three-dimensional, larger-than-life objects.

Chalice, abaca and mahogany