Installation view of the Sears Art Museum in St. George showing Bruce Beasley’s stacked geometric form (second from left) among Albert Dicruttalo’s smoother, more fluid sculptures.

The Sears Art Museum’s current pairing of the work of Bruce Beasley and Albert Dicruttalo invites viewers to consider two accomplished contemporary sculptors and the dynamic relationship between mentor and protégé. Beasley, born in Los Angeles in 1939, has been a central figure in West Coast abstraction for more than six decades. Dicruttalo, born in 1967 in upstate New York, spent 12 formative years as Beasley’s chief assistant before establishing his own practice. Together, their works reveal a lineage of technical mastery and innovation, and sculpture’s continuing pursuit of form as a vessel for motion and meaning.

When Beasley emerged in the early 1960s, sculpture was driven by two dominant impulses: the eclectic materiality of assemblage and the stripped-down geometry of Minimalism. His earliest welded-iron constructions aligned with the former and quickly drew attention—he was included in MoMA’s The Art of Assemblage in 1961. Yet he soon shifted from the old to the new, turning from rusting metal to embrace a material few considered suitable for serious art: cast acrylic. Developing his own casting methods, he produced massive transparent forms that refracted light and revealed their inner architecture. These works shared with Minimalism the emphasis on the manufactured, but Beasley offered an alternative to Minimalism’s opaque surfaces and rigid repetition, returning to earlier Modernist influences and creating works that emphasized motion and optical depth. By the 1980s, he returned to traditional sculptural materials like bronze, stainless steel and granite, but today he continues to engage with new technologies, including digital modeling and virtual reality as tools of design.

Dicruttalo’s practice was shaped by his long apprenticeship in Beasley’s studio, yet as the Sears exhibition demonstrates, he has developed a distinct voice. Trained in computer-aided design (CAD) at Cornell University, Dicruttalo joined Beasley in the late 1990s, mastering the technical challenges of large-scale fabrication. His works, now installed in public spaces across the country, reveal a synthesis of digital precision and sculptural intuition.

Whether cubist or curvilinear, Bruce Beasley’s interlocking, faceted sculptures at the Sears Art Museum embody his enduring exploration of balance, tension, and mass—forms that seem caught between motion and stillness.

Albert Dicruttalo’s “Deus ex machina” from 2013 draws the viewer’s gaze toward its hollow center, evoking depth and gravity.

 Throughout his career, Beasley has remained committed to abstraction, exploring the tension between solidity and motion, presence and absence, mass and transparency. The works on view in St. George, most from the past decade, extend ideas he has pursued for years. His cubist-inspired sculptures, built from interlocking angular planes and faceted volumes, demonstrate his interest in balance, tension and mass. They rise up like geologic monoliths or hang in delicate tension is if they might, at any moment, topple over. Other works suggest the movement of dance in looping, curvilinear forms that seem to unfurl through space. These fluid forms—often digitally modeled and cast in metal or resin—embody Beasley’s fusion of technology and craftsmanship, his enduring search for harmony between geometry and gesture.

Where Beasley’s sculptures insist on tension, struggle, and release, Dicruttalo’s works are frequently grounded in equilibrium, revealing his interest in structure, geometry and the fluid interplay of solid and void. The works range from smooth, polished forms to more open, looping constructions that suggest both precision and movement. Several pieces feature curved, interlocking surfaces where tension arises between containment and expansion. Others explore balance through continuous motion and negative space. A tall, orange-edged sculpture introduces a sharper dynamism, its industrial planes edged with organic rhythm. This is a moment where Dicruttalo comes closest to his mentor’s expressive freedom. If Beasley’s abstraction leans toward the poetic and gestural, Dicruttalo’s finds its strength in the constructed and analytical.

Beasley and Dicruttalo embody two enduring threads within contemporary sculpture: the impulse toward expressive transformation and the pursuit of structural clarity. The Sears exhibit suggests that abstraction, far from being an exhausted modernist language, remains a vital means of inquiry into how material, technology, and imagination intersect as both artists extend the modernist legacy into the digital age, translating hand, thought, and virtual design into tangible form.

Albert Dicruttalo’s “Scofflaw” (far right) comes closest to the expressive freedom of his mentor, Bruce Beasley.

Bruce Beasley and Albert Dicruttalo: Mentor to Colleague, Sears Art Museum, St. George, through November 7.

All images courtesy of the author.

Shawn Rossiter

The founder of Artists of Utah and editor of its online magazine, 15 Bytes, Shawn Rossiter has undergraduate degrees in English, French and Italian Literature and studied Comparative Literature in graduate school before pursuing a career in art.