Christopher Wilmarth worked in the materials of modern urban architecture: glass, steel, and cable. Though a student of the architect and sculptor Tony Smith, Wilmarth made sculptures too imbued with light, too expressive of human longing to be understood as strictly minimalist. In 1974, he wrote that he was “concerned with the complex problem of implying the human presence in a non-objective art,” a problem he addressed by taking his compressed experiences of light and shadow and returning them “to the world as a physical poem.” His sculptures have a certain poetic quality shrewdly tempered by their hard geometric planes and by the ubiquity and commonness of the materials themselves. By juxtaposing wall-mounted sculptures with free-standing ones and including a set of seven watercolors and two late untitled drawings, the spring show at Robert Miller’s capacious new space in Chelsea seemed to emphasize the graphic, almost pictor ...

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