Aaronel deRoy Gruber was a prolific sculptor who, from the late 1960s through the mid 1980s, employed processes and materials of modern industry to fantastical effect. Although largely discounted from the canon both for her gender and her refusal to conform to any singular category of art-making—instead combining various elements of Op Art, Minimalism, and Pop—the Pittsburgh-based artist was known at the time for her use of sleek acrylic in electric, exuberant colors. Crucially, Gruber also helped to pioneer the adoption of kinetics seen in works such as Maxi Cyclopexis (1973). The sculpture, originally acquired by the Michael C. Rockefeller Arts Center, State University of New York, Fredonia, New York, is a major example of the artist’s dynamic kinetic sculptures.

Primed for work that was technological in nature, Gruber received a Bachelor of Science from Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) in 1940, while also studying at the school’s College of Fine Arts. After early beginnings in painting, the artist worked in steel at the encouragement of David Smith, who praised Gruber’s sense of three-dimensionality. In the late 1960s, she began incorporating acrylic into sculptures in complex geometric shapes, sometimes characterized by bulbous forms and concentric squares with rounded edges.

Maintaining a studio above a business that made skylights, the artist had proximity to new production methods for commercial goods. Her preferred method of fabrication, known as vacuum forming, refers to a simple type of plastic shaping that uses heat, a mold, and vacuum pressure to generate distinct geometries. In her hands, these materials and processes abandoned use value, instead enabling her to experiment with bursting color, illuminated edge effects along a work’s seams, and eventually, electric light. 

Informed by Constructivism and the work of artist and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy, Gruber’s work constituted a rigorous approach to abstraction married to cultural meaning, a contrast to Minimalism’s emphasis on material and structure without reference or association. “Although the sculptures are minimal in concept, they are not empty,” wrote critic Donald Miller for Arts Magazine. For instance, the motorized light box construction might suggest a television screen, or the slickness of commercial modes of display more broadly seen in popular interior and industrial design of the period. And while unafraid of fashion (the artist even made jewelry) or what might otherwise be considered frivolous and taboo in the face of hyper-masculine associations with Minimalism, Gruber’s work didn’t entirely fall into the category of Pop either.

As such, her work’s visual effects spoke to the alluring hyperreality of technological advancement in transparent and glowing surfaces made seamless through invisible chemical bonding, easily cut into an array of shapes. Motors operating at slow speed, central to Maxi Cycloplexis, contributed to a feeling of objects floating in space, evoking the rotations of sun and moon. Platonic solids constituted another area of her inquiry, pointing to ancient areas of technical study. Thus, even as her practice was grounded in modern industry, it also evinced a kind of magic and celestial otherworldliness.

Gruber’s work is included in the permanent collection of The Carnegie Museum of Art, the Butler Institute of American Art, the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, the Frick Art Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Kawamura Museum of Modern Art, Japan.