“The Chest with the strange drawer pulls has a conventional body set upon a number of writhing, upended cobra-like, or tendril forms that extend the height of the chest and then wave into the air.” A Rochester critic wrote these words in a review of Wendell Castle’s exhibition at a local gallery in 1965. It was the public debut of one of Castle’s most important works, a design which visibly marks the departure of a young artist from the formal modern art he was making, to a new fusion of furniture and sculpture.
