Hugh Townley was an artist with a singular vision who worked mainly in wood. During his lifetime, he presented more than 50 solo exhibitions in museums and galleries. His works are in the permanent collections of major institutions across the country, including the Museum of Modern Art and Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. So it may seem unusual that “Hugh Townley: Grand Finale,” his final retrospective, is on view in tiny Rochester, Vt.
Townley was born in Indiana in 1923. He taught sculpture and drawing at Brown University in Rhode Island for nearly 30 years, starting in 1961. He died in 2008 having spent the last 11 years of his life in Bethel, Vt.
During those years, Anni Mackay opened her cheekily named BigTown Gallery in tiny Rochester, a 20-minute drive from Bethel. Townley attended the inaugural show and caught Mackay’s eye with his intent examination of each work. They became fast friends.
Mackay mounted several solo exhibitions of Townley’s work, and after his death she became executor of his art estate — a role she has played for a number of artists. The job has involved placing Townley’s art with museums or clients through shows she has organized, including a retrospective at the University of Vermont’s Fleming Museum of Art in 2009.
“Hugh Townley: Grand Finale” at BigTown is the last of these exhibitions before Mackay hands back to the family his artworks that remain in the trust. (BigTown is hosting an event for collectors to see those works on September 19.) Although Mackay noted the difficulty of mounting a show without any new work, the array of pieces on display is varied enough to demonstrate Townley’s creative scope: freestanding wood sculptures, wood reliefs both painted and not, lithographs, embossed prints, drawings, ceramic sculptures. The pieces range in scale from a tiny carving that sits inside a tin Altoids box to an 8-foot-tall sculpture in solid mahogany.
The art begins on BigTown’s whimsical entry porch, which is framed by a two-story circular cutout in the quirky building’s cedar-shingled façade. Townley’s “Townleyberrybush,” from 1960-1962, stands beside the door like a totem, a geometric tower created from a stack of repeated stalk-and-bulb forms in unfinished cedar. Each form is cut from a flat piece of wood, 3 or 4 inches thick, creating volume while still referencing the flat picture plane — a format echoed in many of the works.
A group of freestanding mahogany sculptures, for example, sits just inside the entrance. Also from the 1960s and ranging from 2 to 6 feet tall, the pieces in “Pembroke Maquette, Group of 5” evoke Constantin Brâncuși’s sculptures in their reduction of simple forms to minimal abstraction. A chalice is a half-circle atop a tapering rectangle; a humanoid figure consists of two legs that join to a curved top punctured by a small heart-shaped cutout; a totemic bird squats, its chunky wings outstretched. Unlike Brâncuşi’s curving “Bird in Space,” however, Townley’s sculptures are largely flat, just wide enough at the base to allow them to stand upright. They can be enjoyed in the round, but they announce their full presence from the front.
Townley’s wood reliefs, comprising the majority of the show, layer and interlock those flat shapes in ways that demonstrate significant skill with a band saw. Like puzzles that don’t quite fit together, their components are carved from pieces with different thicknesses and grains. The shapes emerge from each other at different angles yet appear a push away from popping into place. “Early Morning Plan Darkside,” from 1994, is a rectangular relief in mahogany whose finish is a rich sheen. It features an eruption of emblem-like shapes — stars, arrows, hearts, even a mustache — separated from an organic, snaking form by a vertical chevron stripe. Some forms, such as a small panel carved with an undulating surface, playfully escape the relief’s roughly rectangular confines.
Townley’s shapes, like the heart, bring to mind of alternative playing-card suits or children’s drawings. Others derive from nature: a bull’s horns, a crustacean, stylized leaves or clouds, seed pods. They seem to be symbols — especially in “Horizontal 8,” from 1999, a round plywood piece that contains eight small, square openings. Each features an inset shape, such as a curled wave or an eagle-like figure. That he chose the devotional form of the tondo — a large, circular painting usually seen in churches — for the work seems to suggest either a playful jab at art history or a depth of meaning to the inset shapes, or both.
Intriguing but indecipherable, Townley’s shapes can be appreciated simply for his evident enjoyment in creating them.
Townley himself never consciously developed a personal symbology as did, say, Catalan painter Joan Miró — an artist whose work similarly bridges figuration and abstraction. During a 1972 oral-history interview with the Smithsonian, Townley said, “People are constantly asking me, … ‘What does that mean?’ ‘Are these literal symbols?’ I don’t know.” In 1969, he settled on calling them “spells” in a portfolio of lithographs. Each page of “Seventy-eight Spells” displays rows of unique negative-on-black shapes. Intriguing but indecipherable, Townley’s shapes can be appreciated simply for his evident enjoyment in creating them.
In the latter half of the 1990s, Townley experimented with painted wooden sculptures: rough-hewn, open-sided boxes displaying small, colorful sculptural shapes and reliefs in arrestingly vibrant, high-gloss colors. “Trocadero,” from 1996, sets a profusion of colored shapes on the left side — in two or three shades each of purple, red, green and blue — against a largely black right half.
Several of Townley’s titles reference place. They include “South Indian Village,” from 1999, a smaller relief in maple depicting leaves akin to palm fronds and made after 10 visits to India. “Trocadero” likely refers to the Parisian park and palace across the Seine River from the Eiffel Tower.
Townley began his art career in Europe: He studied after college with sculptor Ossip Zadkine in Paris and had his first solo show in 1948 in the Hague in the Netherlands. He lived and made art in Paris and London for two more years. Having absorbed continental influences, over the following five decades he developed his own unique body of work, which combines instantly relatable materials and craftsmanship with mystery, humor and — to use one of his favorite emblems — heart.
The original print version of this article was headlined “A Modern Man: Twentieth-century sculptor Hugh Townley’s retrospective at BigTown in Rochester showcases form and whimsy”
This article appears in September 9 • 2026.
Got something to say?
Send a letter to the editor and we'll publish your feedback in print!
