Tony Matelli
Head (Orange), 2018
Concrete and painted bronze
29.21 x 22.86cm
11.50 x 9.00 in
Concrete and painted bronze
29.21 x 22.86cm
11.50 x 9.00 in
Atlas, 2016
Concrete, steel and painted bronze
102 x 46cm
40.16 x 18.11 in
Concrete, steel and painted bronze
102 x 46cm
40.16 x 18.11 in
Woman with Bowl, 2017
Concrete and painted bronze
168 x 50cm
66.14 x 19.69 in
Concrete and painted bronze
168 x 50cm
66.14 x 19.69 in
Tony Matelli
Born in 1971, in Chicago, USA.
Lives and works in New York, USA.
Education
1995
MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, USA
1993
BFA, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Wisconsin, USA
1991
Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art-Independent Study, New York, USA
Lives and works in New York, USA.
Education
1995
MFA, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Michigan, USA
1993
BFA, Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, Wisconsin, USA
1991
Alliance of Independent Colleges of Art-Independent Study, New York, USA
Tony Matelli is a trickster, a trader in combinatory illusions, a skilled manipulator of the restless mediation between metaphor, meaning and truth.
Truths are illusions which we have
forgotten are illusions. They are
metaphors that have become worn out
and have been drained of sensuous force.
Frederick Nietzsche
And if there is art enough, a lie can
enlighten as well as the truth. What is the
truth anyway, that truth? As we know
ourselves we are fake objects, fakes,
bundles of illusions.
Iris Murdoch
Matelli leverages the uncanny idioms of realism to depict things in transition, between seemingly fixed states of meaning and more amorphous, elusive truths. Several distinctive concerns thread through his growing oeuvre: exploring unexpected cultural (and artistic) limitations; depicting, as he puts it, "things finding a wayward means of survival;" and representing complex states of relation - subjectivity, liminality, dependence, love - freighted with cultural consequence.
His work is persistently surprising. It possesses the quality of subterfuge, revelling conceptually in contradictory tensions. Erudition transforms vulgarity, coercive tenderness competes with maverick humor, intellect hones expressionistic passion. Challenging, complicated and darkly funny, the work has a narrativizing complexity that circulates around relationships (social and aesthetic) and the slippery constitutive process that endows objects and images with significance. Meaning remains fluid and unpredictable; the work escapes easy capture.
While still in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the young artist had an epiphany with "My Soul Searching Has Finally Paid Off" (1995). A scrappy handmade cardboard box on which his name was silkscreened boldly in Pepto-pink lettering. The piece was open, irreverent, abject - nearly unrecognizable as a product of creative endeavor. A sly nod to Minimalist precedents and conceptual strategies, it addressed the artistic quest and the art object's status, as well as the construction of artistic persona, through metaphor. Matelli became Matelli.
A participant in the expanding tradition of sculpture's relationship to the ordinary, Matelli understands the figure's action as object, its openness to metaphor and allegorical expressiveness. He exploits the uncanny power of simulation as a mode of transformation rather than mimicry, and employs realism - in various gradations of relation to the real - as a formal strategy rather than an end in itself. Uninterested in mimesis, he creates work that is "just real enough". Real enough to engage and disarm a viewer, real enough to confuse. Conceptually driven, the work manipulates the potent immediacy of the realist idiom.
Matelli's large-scale tableaux are anti-monuments, irreverent recastings of sculpture's relationship to the ordinary. Lost and Sick (1996) stages a life-size trio of Boy Scouts puking in a forest clearing, betrayed by the impossible motto: "Always Be Prepared." Outfitted in cartoonishly cheerful uniforms, blazing red scarves tied neatly at the neck, the boys are wretchedly undone by unforeseen mishap. A companion sculpture, Lost and Sick in the Winter (2000/2001), encapsulates a sequel of misadventure. Older now, the group is again helplessly astray, this time in a frozen place. Each piece reads as the deadpan punch-line to a queasy joke on the pathos of human fallibility. The figures are absurd and lost, no better off together than if alone. And yet, still, they are together, and herein lies the potential for recovery.
Matelli returns again and again to questions of individual potency and social promise. Very, Very First Man: Necessary Alterations (1998-99) depicts two early hominids trapped on a rocky mount, futilely attempting to reverse the biological (and social) process of evolution. One figure, nearly erect, his own backend visibly wounded by the treatment, attempts to re-attach the bloodied tail of his crouching companion with a crude bone needle. It's an anguished ancestral portrait, full of twisted humor; a "what if" scenario that imagines collaborative contingencies in the "story of man" to comment ironically on human advancement, such as it is.
Clearly, Matelli is an avid cultural sampler. He quotes the dominant visual culture as fluidly as he pilfers the storehouse of Art's history, and his mix of ideas and images, while wildly diverse, reflects a quixotic rather than random rationale. The work's vibe owes much to the mischievous ironies and clever allusions of hip-hop culture and to the quirky passions of alternative pop music - the soundtrack of his practice, one might say. Like Beck, who is widely recognized for his layering of witty abstract phrases over idiosyncratic sonoric collage, Matelli works the pop wonderland of poetic disjuncture, consolidating mercurial references into objects at once recognizable and startlingly new.
Importantly, Matelli's vocabulary is an idiomatic hybrid, deriving as much from the experiments and departures of postmodern artistic practice as from the strategies of popular commercial culture. It is indebted to Fluxus, that willful challenge to art's aesthetic and social limits carried out under cover of small maneuvers and radical mischief. His work inherits tension and sophistication from the theoretical legacies of Conceptualism and Minimalism. And clearly, the seductions of Warholian Pop hold sway. But while Matelli shares Warhol's abiding fascination with "the downgraded, the ignored, the abused, the forgotten, the ridiculed, the stupid, the debased," he carries his own ambivalent romanticism, idiosyncratic levity and moral edge to the encounter.
For example, Ideal Woman (1998-99) embodies an ambitious risk - socially, emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically. Reclaiming a cartoon half-remembered from an old Hustler, which crudely sketched the "perfect woman" as self-serve sex machine, the piece revels in comedic grotesquery. The ideal imagined by this particular macho reduction, rendered uncomfortably "real" in three dimensions, is 4-foot tall and flat-headed. Naked but for black panties, she stands on a square of cheap carpet amid empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. Her toothless smile curves serenely toward meaningfully oversized ears.
Cast in silicone rubber, the figure's freckled skin has a touchable fleshiness. Its opalescent green eyes, framed by fine lashes and brows, shine with life-like appeal. The piece is enlivened by rasping contradiction: delicate craftsmanship (and the kind of attention to detail one could only describe as loving), jars against the crude affront of the image it realizes. A subtle contrapposto, at odds with the awkward distortion of lumpen proportions, resonates directly against classical idealizations of the nude female form. Yet, beckoning warmly, arms outstretched in a gesture that subtly invokes religious iconography, the figure is imbued with grace. Disturbing and inscrutable, simultaneously compelling and repellent, it is profoundly eerie to be around.
The piece implicates the artist personally, specifically in terms of his relationship with the widely recognized girlfriend on whom it was modeled and who collaborated in its production. ("Oooh," viewers whispered in the galleries, "...isn't that his girlfriend?" The story circulates like folklore around the figure.) The intimacy of the gamble is crucial to the work: real life and love were at stake, and art making explored the ethical elasticity of one particular relationship. Forced to stare, we step into Matelli's shoes, project our feelings onto his model and imagine her ambivalence about the enterprise. Tinged with autobiography, and a touch of the Pygmalian myth, the sculpture transforms a sexist joke into an object of anthropological and philosophical inquiry, reinvesting a derisive abstraction with intimate moral consequence.
Gilles Delueze writes, "The true history is the history of desire." What does it mean to reshape one's beloved through malignant longing? This is surely not uncommon. Matelli approached the project as an exercise, as a way to confront his life's capacity to bear the weight of art, and so brought into question important assumptions about meaning, representation, and the art object's status - as estranged from the real world, and as fetish. He wanted to see if it was "possible to integrate such a perversion" into a relationship, to layer a "faceless idea" onto a real-life partner, to "develop a negative dialectic, where even a negative action can have positive results." The erotic and emotional charge of the work lies in its transgressive refusal to gloss the unholy complexities of desire, and in its production of a terrible beauty. Neither a portrait of one woman, nor of Woman as a cultural subject cheapened by reductive speculation, the brilliance of Ideal Woman lies in both its specificity and in its refusal to stay put.
Matelli's characters seem to cast about in stories that we can only imagine, inhabiting narrative "climaxes" - captured moments with the ruptured quality of a snapshot - that repudiate the comforts of trajectory and dénouement. His single figures are uncertain agents, cut loose to implicate their environments and the viewers who encounter them. Sleepwalker (1998), for example, depicts the life-size figure of a somnambulant young man. Vulnerable in his BVDs, he is zombified, maw agape, arms outstretched, caught dumb and sluggish in-between security and disconnection. Wandering beyond the range of enacted subjectivity, eyes closed, the sleepwalker is unaware of life, even refuses it. He reads as an embodied indictment.
The liminality and social (dis)connection evoked by Sleepwalker carry different emotional charge in Stray Dog (1998), by virtue of the latter's public orientation. Matelli's first commission for the Public Art Fund, it is an incongruously moving sculpture of a seeing-eye dog lost on an urban thoroughfare; though absent from view, his blind owner is brought very much to mind, presumably stumbling along somewhere. Conceived in witty opposition to monumentalizing public art trends that produce "stranded objects, static, alien and without effect," it is public sculpture "with instant accessibility, not only in our reality but from our reality." As a reconsideration of art in everyday spaces, the piece effects a recouperative transformation: a signifier of pathos, of loss and displacement, it is also an object of love, adopted as a pet by residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood where it stands.
Matelli proposed Abandon (2000), his first site-specific gallery commission (a project I organized for the UB Art Gallery at SUNY/Buffalo), as an exercise in calculated failure predicated on weeds. Prosaic objects which manage to be "waste and life at the same time," weeds lend themselves, perhaps incomparably, to a focused exploration of metaphor and meaning. Marking dissolution and rejection, yet vital and persistent, their meaning is essentially contingent and their truth is entirely metaphorical, deriving from relations vested in culture rather than nature. For Matelli, weeds are "the horticultural equivalent of a zit," and "represent a breakdown, either a failure or refusal to fight the perfunctory battle against entropy." If, as he writes, "One weed is a forgivable blemish. Overgrowth is hopeless abandon. Overgrowth inside is the cultivation of abandonment, a rewriting of rules. The celebration of failure." Unknowable in their own right, most alive through metaphor, weeds are perfect foils for aesthetic concerns and social relations.
Casting individual specimens in sets of multiples and installing them directly in the gallery floor, Matelli transformed weeds - through concept, process, multiplication and re-presentation - into vessels of indeterminacy. Seeming to be one thing, yet meaning something else altogether, they became wayward object-metaphors, regaining the "sensuous force" Nietzsche prized as they were revealed to be illusions. Matelli's installation - "an art installation that does not at all resemble art"- turned a space of cultural cultivation into a breeding ground for uncertain meaning, and his weeds suggested the many truths that elude us just as we think we've got them yanked tight. It is this sort of astute unpredictability, this biting conglomeration of wily humor and cultural politics, that is Matelli's distinction.
His most recent project, Sexual Sunrise (2002), investigates the new sexual relationship as an intense form of reflection in which we see our most beautiful and most base selves. It is the artist's most overtly personal work to date. The installation centers on three life-size self-portraits - The Wanderer, Hunter and Reverie - each an imposing figural diorama, surrounded by a wallpaper of deep blue sea that wraps the room like tidal wainscoting. An eponymously titled "painting," in foil and collage, layers the orgasmic faces of women over a tourist-trade beach scene. It hangs like a rejuvenating promise on the illusory horizon.
The figures riff loosely on 18th and 19th century fine art precedents, reformulating romantic and realist conventions through a contemporary vernacular. In each, a calculation of references presents layers of "self" that multiply like reflections in a hall of mirrors - an effect both amusing and discomfiting. The Wanderer updates Gustave Courbet's The Meeting (1854), itself a reworking of popular iconography into a self-portrait of the artist as the proverbial Wandering Jew. In khaki cargo pants, a crisp white dress shirt with a jaunty bandanna at the neck, toes visible through holey white socks strapped into sandals, Matelli is the urban outsider, a slightly absurd romantic bound for self-discovery.
Hunter lifts Rococo elements from the genre scenes of Jean-Honore Fragonard, flushed paintings of lovers'trysts in verdant gardens. Clad in a red union suit (the kind that keep American hunters warm and unbutton for easy access), the artist is on the prowl in a leafy wilderness tableau. He is a bird-dog (with all that implies), a heady hedonist poised at the ready. Rope-snare coiled in one hand, he lifts fresh scent to his inflamed nose from the other, hot on the tail of the next sexual conquest.
Reverie is modeled on the work of Antoine Watteau, the early 18th century painter of bourgeois social life who relished stock characters - the debauched dreamer, the capricious lover, the witless clown - drawn from the popular street theater of commedia dell'arte. Cast as foils in bawdy plots full of musical romancing and licentious pleasure, the characters mimicked a contemporary milieu in which role-playing was crucial and strategic. Matelli, seated on a rock, eyes glazed and head slung back in a post-coital stupor, guitar nearly forgotten on his lap, is the artist as sexual player. . . or as hapless suicide. Shoeless, in a Nike sweat suit, the artist succumbs and is rendered impotent by dreams. The rope, a tool of uncertain use, hangs limp behind him.
Portraiture is always a game of doubling, a match of gestures - the artist's, whose originality finds plastic expression, and the subject's, whose unique qualities are conveyed - through portrayal. Self-portraiture ups the ante, shifts focus to the artist alone, whose dualized subjectivity (as maker and model) is at stake. "Know Thyself" has long been the watchword of this peculiarly human enterprise, constituted in the sluice from interiority to external form. Truth, illusion and metaphor are inevitably at stake. In making himself monstrous, Matelli reprises the Baroque portrait in extremis, a life-cast designed to capture the raw intensities of human emotion; he also references a Mannerist effect to become a stranger, to present "the artist" anew. His oversized glasses double the process of looking, magnifying the figure's eyes while shielding them from view. The effect is disturbingly comedic, and laden with metaphor.
Cloaked in the shrewd illusions of hyper-realism, Matelli's doppelgangers embody a conceptual gambit toward complex truths that are both individual and social. Simultaneously grandiose and parodic, his figures are islands of ego, isolated and adrift on uncharted seas of connection; triangulated, they map (artistic) selfhood as threatened and inflated by fantasy, distorted and clarified by the quest for self-knowledge. The artist stands as a cultural foil for all manner of speculation and revelation, onto whom desires are projected and who, in turn, absorbs and reflects them. Equal parts heroic provocateur, feckless dreamer and unwitting captive to unruly desire, the artist presents our best and most base selves.
Tony Matelli's practice is a highly personal enterprise, his signature inventiveness a product of the tension between strident individualism and a longing for collectivity. There is nothing coolly dispassionate about the work and, more often than not, it pokes at directly at the sore spots where our intimate selves connect to the larger social world. Irreverent and playful, the work counters the de rigueur preference for "objectivity" with an ethos that embraces and pursues the indeterminacy of meaning. In the complexity of its intent and realization, and its openness to metaphor, it often runs the deliberate risk of being taken the wrong way. Matelli is a transformer - it's a risk he's more than willing to take.
Lisa Fishman
Truths are illusions which we have
forgotten are illusions. They are
metaphors that have become worn out
and have been drained of sensuous force.
Frederick Nietzsche
And if there is art enough, a lie can
enlighten as well as the truth. What is the
truth anyway, that truth? As we know
ourselves we are fake objects, fakes,
bundles of illusions.
Iris Murdoch
Matelli leverages the uncanny idioms of realism to depict things in transition, between seemingly fixed states of meaning and more amorphous, elusive truths. Several distinctive concerns thread through his growing oeuvre: exploring unexpected cultural (and artistic) limitations; depicting, as he puts it, "things finding a wayward means of survival;" and representing complex states of relation - subjectivity, liminality, dependence, love - freighted with cultural consequence.
His work is persistently surprising. It possesses the quality of subterfuge, revelling conceptually in contradictory tensions. Erudition transforms vulgarity, coercive tenderness competes with maverick humor, intellect hones expressionistic passion. Challenging, complicated and darkly funny, the work has a narrativizing complexity that circulates around relationships (social and aesthetic) and the slippery constitutive process that endows objects and images with significance. Meaning remains fluid and unpredictable; the work escapes easy capture.
While still in graduate school at the Cranbrook Academy of Art, the young artist had an epiphany with "My Soul Searching Has Finally Paid Off" (1995). A scrappy handmade cardboard box on which his name was silkscreened boldly in Pepto-pink lettering. The piece was open, irreverent, abject - nearly unrecognizable as a product of creative endeavor. A sly nod to Minimalist precedents and conceptual strategies, it addressed the artistic quest and the art object's status, as well as the construction of artistic persona, through metaphor. Matelli became Matelli.
A participant in the expanding tradition of sculpture's relationship to the ordinary, Matelli understands the figure's action as object, its openness to metaphor and allegorical expressiveness. He exploits the uncanny power of simulation as a mode of transformation rather than mimicry, and employs realism - in various gradations of relation to the real - as a formal strategy rather than an end in itself. Uninterested in mimesis, he creates work that is "just real enough". Real enough to engage and disarm a viewer, real enough to confuse. Conceptually driven, the work manipulates the potent immediacy of the realist idiom.
Matelli's large-scale tableaux are anti-monuments, irreverent recastings of sculpture's relationship to the ordinary. Lost and Sick (1996) stages a life-size trio of Boy Scouts puking in a forest clearing, betrayed by the impossible motto: "Always Be Prepared." Outfitted in cartoonishly cheerful uniforms, blazing red scarves tied neatly at the neck, the boys are wretchedly undone by unforeseen mishap. A companion sculpture, Lost and Sick in the Winter (2000/2001), encapsulates a sequel of misadventure. Older now, the group is again helplessly astray, this time in a frozen place. Each piece reads as the deadpan punch-line to a queasy joke on the pathos of human fallibility. The figures are absurd and lost, no better off together than if alone. And yet, still, they are together, and herein lies the potential for recovery.
Matelli returns again and again to questions of individual potency and social promise. Very, Very First Man: Necessary Alterations (1998-99) depicts two early hominids trapped on a rocky mount, futilely attempting to reverse the biological (and social) process of evolution. One figure, nearly erect, his own backend visibly wounded by the treatment, attempts to re-attach the bloodied tail of his crouching companion with a crude bone needle. It's an anguished ancestral portrait, full of twisted humor; a "what if" scenario that imagines collaborative contingencies in the "story of man" to comment ironically on human advancement, such as it is.
Clearly, Matelli is an avid cultural sampler. He quotes the dominant visual culture as fluidly as he pilfers the storehouse of Art's history, and his mix of ideas and images, while wildly diverse, reflects a quixotic rather than random rationale. The work's vibe owes much to the mischievous ironies and clever allusions of hip-hop culture and to the quirky passions of alternative pop music - the soundtrack of his practice, one might say. Like Beck, who is widely recognized for his layering of witty abstract phrases over idiosyncratic sonoric collage, Matelli works the pop wonderland of poetic disjuncture, consolidating mercurial references into objects at once recognizable and startlingly new.
Importantly, Matelli's vocabulary is an idiomatic hybrid, deriving as much from the experiments and departures of postmodern artistic practice as from the strategies of popular commercial culture. It is indebted to Fluxus, that willful challenge to art's aesthetic and social limits carried out under cover of small maneuvers and radical mischief. His work inherits tension and sophistication from the theoretical legacies of Conceptualism and Minimalism. And clearly, the seductions of Warholian Pop hold sway. But while Matelli shares Warhol's abiding fascination with "the downgraded, the ignored, the abused, the forgotten, the ridiculed, the stupid, the debased," he carries his own ambivalent romanticism, idiosyncratic levity and moral edge to the encounter.
For example, Ideal Woman (1998-99) embodies an ambitious risk - socially, emotionally, intellectually and aesthetically. Reclaiming a cartoon half-remembered from an old Hustler, which crudely sketched the "perfect woman" as self-serve sex machine, the piece revels in comedic grotesquery. The ideal imagined by this particular macho reduction, rendered uncomfortably "real" in three dimensions, is 4-foot tall and flat-headed. Naked but for black panties, she stands on a square of cheap carpet amid empty beer bottles and cigarette butts. Her toothless smile curves serenely toward meaningfully oversized ears.
Cast in silicone rubber, the figure's freckled skin has a touchable fleshiness. Its opalescent green eyes, framed by fine lashes and brows, shine with life-like appeal. The piece is enlivened by rasping contradiction: delicate craftsmanship (and the kind of attention to detail one could only describe as loving), jars against the crude affront of the image it realizes. A subtle contrapposto, at odds with the awkward distortion of lumpen proportions, resonates directly against classical idealizations of the nude female form. Yet, beckoning warmly, arms outstretched in a gesture that subtly invokes religious iconography, the figure is imbued with grace. Disturbing and inscrutable, simultaneously compelling and repellent, it is profoundly eerie to be around.
The piece implicates the artist personally, specifically in terms of his relationship with the widely recognized girlfriend on whom it was modeled and who collaborated in its production. ("Oooh," viewers whispered in the galleries, "...isn't that his girlfriend?" The story circulates like folklore around the figure.) The intimacy of the gamble is crucial to the work: real life and love were at stake, and art making explored the ethical elasticity of one particular relationship. Forced to stare, we step into Matelli's shoes, project our feelings onto his model and imagine her ambivalence about the enterprise. Tinged with autobiography, and a touch of the Pygmalian myth, the sculpture transforms a sexist joke into an object of anthropological and philosophical inquiry, reinvesting a derisive abstraction with intimate moral consequence.
Gilles Delueze writes, "The true history is the history of desire." What does it mean to reshape one's beloved through malignant longing? This is surely not uncommon. Matelli approached the project as an exercise, as a way to confront his life's capacity to bear the weight of art, and so brought into question important assumptions about meaning, representation, and the art object's status - as estranged from the real world, and as fetish. He wanted to see if it was "possible to integrate such a perversion" into a relationship, to layer a "faceless idea" onto a real-life partner, to "develop a negative dialectic, where even a negative action can have positive results." The erotic and emotional charge of the work lies in its transgressive refusal to gloss the unholy complexities of desire, and in its production of a terrible beauty. Neither a portrait of one woman, nor of Woman as a cultural subject cheapened by reductive speculation, the brilliance of Ideal Woman lies in both its specificity and in its refusal to stay put.
Matelli's characters seem to cast about in stories that we can only imagine, inhabiting narrative "climaxes" - captured moments with the ruptured quality of a snapshot - that repudiate the comforts of trajectory and dénouement. His single figures are uncertain agents, cut loose to implicate their environments and the viewers who encounter them. Sleepwalker (1998), for example, depicts the life-size figure of a somnambulant young man. Vulnerable in his BVDs, he is zombified, maw agape, arms outstretched, caught dumb and sluggish in-between security and disconnection. Wandering beyond the range of enacted subjectivity, eyes closed, the sleepwalker is unaware of life, even refuses it. He reads as an embodied indictment.
The liminality and social (dis)connection evoked by Sleepwalker carry different emotional charge in Stray Dog (1998), by virtue of the latter's public orientation. Matelli's first commission for the Public Art Fund, it is an incongruously moving sculpture of a seeing-eye dog lost on an urban thoroughfare; though absent from view, his blind owner is brought very much to mind, presumably stumbling along somewhere. Conceived in witty opposition to monumentalizing public art trends that produce "stranded objects, static, alien and without effect," it is public sculpture "with instant accessibility, not only in our reality but from our reality." As a reconsideration of art in everyday spaces, the piece effects a recouperative transformation: a signifier of pathos, of loss and displacement, it is also an object of love, adopted as a pet by residents of the Brooklyn neighborhood where it stands.
Matelli proposed Abandon (2000), his first site-specific gallery commission (a project I organized for the UB Art Gallery at SUNY/Buffalo), as an exercise in calculated failure predicated on weeds. Prosaic objects which manage to be "waste and life at the same time," weeds lend themselves, perhaps incomparably, to a focused exploration of metaphor and meaning. Marking dissolution and rejection, yet vital and persistent, their meaning is essentially contingent and their truth is entirely metaphorical, deriving from relations vested in culture rather than nature. For Matelli, weeds are "the horticultural equivalent of a zit," and "represent a breakdown, either a failure or refusal to fight the perfunctory battle against entropy." If, as he writes, "One weed is a forgivable blemish. Overgrowth is hopeless abandon. Overgrowth inside is the cultivation of abandonment, a rewriting of rules. The celebration of failure." Unknowable in their own right, most alive through metaphor, weeds are perfect foils for aesthetic concerns and social relations.
Casting individual specimens in sets of multiples and installing them directly in the gallery floor, Matelli transformed weeds - through concept, process, multiplication and re-presentation - into vessels of indeterminacy. Seeming to be one thing, yet meaning something else altogether, they became wayward object-metaphors, regaining the "sensuous force" Nietzsche prized as they were revealed to be illusions. Matelli's installation - "an art installation that does not at all resemble art"- turned a space of cultural cultivation into a breeding ground for uncertain meaning, and his weeds suggested the many truths that elude us just as we think we've got them yanked tight. It is this sort of astute unpredictability, this biting conglomeration of wily humor and cultural politics, that is Matelli's distinction.
His most recent project, Sexual Sunrise (2002), investigates the new sexual relationship as an intense form of reflection in which we see our most beautiful and most base selves. It is the artist's most overtly personal work to date. The installation centers on three life-size self-portraits - The Wanderer, Hunter and Reverie - each an imposing figural diorama, surrounded by a wallpaper of deep blue sea that wraps the room like tidal wainscoting. An eponymously titled "painting," in foil and collage, layers the orgasmic faces of women over a tourist-trade beach scene. It hangs like a rejuvenating promise on the illusory horizon.
The figures riff loosely on 18th and 19th century fine art precedents, reformulating romantic and realist conventions through a contemporary vernacular. In each, a calculation of references presents layers of "self" that multiply like reflections in a hall of mirrors - an effect both amusing and discomfiting. The Wanderer updates Gustave Courbet's The Meeting (1854), itself a reworking of popular iconography into a self-portrait of the artist as the proverbial Wandering Jew. In khaki cargo pants, a crisp white dress shirt with a jaunty bandanna at the neck, toes visible through holey white socks strapped into sandals, Matelli is the urban outsider, a slightly absurd romantic bound for self-discovery.
Hunter lifts Rococo elements from the genre scenes of Jean-Honore Fragonard, flushed paintings of lovers'trysts in verdant gardens. Clad in a red union suit (the kind that keep American hunters warm and unbutton for easy access), the artist is on the prowl in a leafy wilderness tableau. He is a bird-dog (with all that implies), a heady hedonist poised at the ready. Rope-snare coiled in one hand, he lifts fresh scent to his inflamed nose from the other, hot on the tail of the next sexual conquest.
Reverie is modeled on the work of Antoine Watteau, the early 18th century painter of bourgeois social life who relished stock characters - the debauched dreamer, the capricious lover, the witless clown - drawn from the popular street theater of commedia dell'arte. Cast as foils in bawdy plots full of musical romancing and licentious pleasure, the characters mimicked a contemporary milieu in which role-playing was crucial and strategic. Matelli, seated on a rock, eyes glazed and head slung back in a post-coital stupor, guitar nearly forgotten on his lap, is the artist as sexual player. . . or as hapless suicide. Shoeless, in a Nike sweat suit, the artist succumbs and is rendered impotent by dreams. The rope, a tool of uncertain use, hangs limp behind him.
Portraiture is always a game of doubling, a match of gestures - the artist's, whose originality finds plastic expression, and the subject's, whose unique qualities are conveyed - through portrayal. Self-portraiture ups the ante, shifts focus to the artist alone, whose dualized subjectivity (as maker and model) is at stake. "Know Thyself" has long been the watchword of this peculiarly human enterprise, constituted in the sluice from interiority to external form. Truth, illusion and metaphor are inevitably at stake. In making himself monstrous, Matelli reprises the Baroque portrait in extremis, a life-cast designed to capture the raw intensities of human emotion; he also references a Mannerist effect to become a stranger, to present "the artist" anew. His oversized glasses double the process of looking, magnifying the figure's eyes while shielding them from view. The effect is disturbingly comedic, and laden with metaphor.
Cloaked in the shrewd illusions of hyper-realism, Matelli's doppelgangers embody a conceptual gambit toward complex truths that are both individual and social. Simultaneously grandiose and parodic, his figures are islands of ego, isolated and adrift on uncharted seas of connection; triangulated, they map (artistic) selfhood as threatened and inflated by fantasy, distorted and clarified by the quest for self-knowledge. The artist stands as a cultural foil for all manner of speculation and revelation, onto whom desires are projected and who, in turn, absorbs and reflects them. Equal parts heroic provocateur, feckless dreamer and unwitting captive to unruly desire, the artist presents our best and most base selves.
Tony Matelli's practice is a highly personal enterprise, his signature inventiveness a product of the tension between strident individualism and a longing for collectivity. There is nothing coolly dispassionate about the work and, more often than not, it pokes at directly at the sore spots where our intimate selves connect to the larger social world. Irreverent and playful, the work counters the de rigueur preference for "objectivity" with an ethos that embraces and pursues the indeterminacy of meaning. In the complexity of its intent and realization, and its openness to metaphor, it often runs the deliberate risk of being taken the wrong way. Matelli is a transformer - it's a risk he's more than willing to take.
Lisa Fishman
Group shows at Ceysson Gallery
Relics, Paris
September 06 - October 06, 2018
Solo shows
2018
Real Estate Fine Art, Brooklyn, USA
I Hope All Is Well..., 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, USA
2017
Past - Life, Marlborough Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
Hera, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA
2016
Realisms, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
2015
Garden, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
Garden, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
2014
Tony Matelli, Olaf Bruening, John Miller, Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc., Moscow, Russia
Tony Matelli: New Gravity, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, USA
2013
Stephane Simoens Contemporary, Knokke, Belgium
White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, USA
Tony Matelli - A HUMAN ECHO, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway
Windows, Walls and Mirrors, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
2012
Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Tony Matelli - A HUMAN ECHO, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
Windows, Walls and Mirrors, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
2011
Falkenrot Prize 2011: Tony Matelli: Glass of Water, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Glass of Water, Selestat Bienniale, Selestat, France
2010
The Constant Now, Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Tony Matelli: Mirror Paintings, Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Mise en Abyme, Stephane Simoens Contemporary, Knokke, Belgium
2009
Yesterday, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
The Idiot, Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc., Moscow, Russia
Life and Times, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
Abandon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
2008
Survival, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc., Moscow, Russia
Survival, Uppsala Kunstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden
The Old Me, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
Self Portraits, with Phillip Akkerman, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
2007
New Works, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
2006
Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Charlotte Moser Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland
2005
Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, Paris, France
Abandon, Centre d’Arte Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain
2004
Abandon, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria
Fucked and The Oracle, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria
2003 Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Sies & Hoeke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany
2002
Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, Paris, France
Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome Sperone Jr., Rome, Italy
Bailey Fine Art, Toronto, Canada
2001
Leo Koenig Inc., New York, USA
Art Dealers Invitational, Marseille, France
2000
Sies+ Hoeke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany
Ten in One Gallery, New York, USA
Torch Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherland
Galerie du Triangle, Bordeaux, France
1999
Abandon, University of Buffalo Art Gallery, New York, USA
Andrehn Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Basilico Fine Arts, New York, USA
1997
Basilico Fine Arts, New York, USA
Ten in One Gallery, Chicago, USA
Group shows
2018
[entro'pi?], curated by Lars Rahbek, St. Kongensgade 50, Copenhagen, Denmark
Relics, Ceysson & Bénétière, Paris, France
Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining The Sublime, curated by Joel Sternfeld, Grey Art Gallery, New York, USA
People: Figurative Sculpture, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, New York, USA
BURNT, curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, Marlborough Contemporary, New York, USA
Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA
This Is A Pipe: Realism And The Found Object In Contemporary Art, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, USA
Reshaped Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Tubingen, Baden Puttemberg, Germany; Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2017
The Sunshine Eaters, Onsite Gallery, OCAD University, Toronto, Canada
Beyond Nature, Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, Paris, France
What’s Up - The Americas, Smart Fine Arts, London, United Kingdom
de tussentijd (the meantime), Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands
August Sun, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athen, USA
No Place Like Home, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Reshaped Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia
Just The Facts, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, USA
2016
SMS SOS, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
Wanderlust, The High Line, New York, USA
Ancient Echo, 10 Hanover, London, United Kingdom
Fountain of Youth, Bill Brady Gallery, Miami, USA
Summer School, Flag Art Foundation, New York, USA
Ground Control, Art Basel Miami Beach Public 2016, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA
Silleteros, KINMAN, London, United Kingdom
Comme si de rien n’était (As If Nothing had Happened), Van Buuren Museum, Brussels, Belgium
Green Doesn’t Sell, Art Brussels, Sorry We Are Closed, Brussels, Belgium
Realisms, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Watermill Center, Watermill, USA
So I turned myself to face me, Marlborough Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
Fresh Cuts, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, USA
Home Improvements, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, USA
Forever, Bubox, Kortrijk, Belgium
Mystifiers, NCCA, Moscow, Russia
Reshaping Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico
2015
Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, USA
Unrealism, presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, The Moore Building, Miami, USA
Mutated Reality, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Bottoms Up: A Sculpture Survey, The Art Museum of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA
Brunch Over Troubled Water, Plutschow Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
At the Crack of Dawn, LARM Galleri, Copenhagen, Denmark
Eagles II, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain
Seven Deadly Sins: LUST, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA
Condensed Matter Community, Synchrotron Radiation Center: Home of Aladdin, Stoughton, USA
2014
Walk-ins Welcome, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
Broadway Morey Boogie, Broadway Mall Association, New York, USA
Another Look at Detroit, curated by Todd Levin, Marlborough Chelsea and Marianne Bosky Gallery, New York, USA
Vintage Violence, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, USA
About Sculpture #1, Galerie Ronaldo Anselmi, Berlin, Germany
Baroque, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm, Sweden
2013
Double Hamburger Deluxe, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
UNCANNY, Contemporary Art Galleries, Storrs, USA
Director’s Choice 7-9-13, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
SOMETHING ABOUT A TREE, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA
A Study in Midwestern Appropriation, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, USA
Pizza Time!, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
Beer Show, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
De leur Temps 4, ADIAF, Paris, France
Quiet Works, Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
Desire, El Segundo Museum of Art, USA
LOST (in LA), FLAX Foundation, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park
Cultural Freedom in Europe, Goethe Institut and Sint Lukas Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2012
Simulacrum, curated by Michael Goodson, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, USA
He Is Transparent, Renwick Gallery, New York, USA
you, your sun and shadow, curated by Michael Jones McKean, Anderson Gallery at VCU, Richmond, USA
2011
Dark Christmas, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
December, curated by Howie Chen, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, USA
Selestat Biennal, curated by Hans Dunser, Olivier Grasser, Sophie Kaplan, Pierre-Olivier Rollin and Otto Teichert, Selestat, France
echos, Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, France
Small, Medium, Large, curated by Francis Breist and Susanne van Hagen, Donjon, Vez, France
Pretty on the Inside, curated by Erik Parker and KAWS, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY
Sculptures, Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, France
Personal Structures, curated by Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold, 54th International Venice Biennale: ILLUMInations, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy
Impossible Vacation, White Flag Projects, St. Louis, USA
Fragmentations, FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France
2010
Hunters & Gatherers, Gian Enzo Sperone, Sent, Switzerland
A vos papiers, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
Transcending..., LARMgalleri, Copenhagen, Denmark
Love in Vein, Gering & Lopez, New York, USA
No Show, Spencer Brownstone, New York, USA
Just Love Me, MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg
The Wasteland, The White Box, New York, USA
Both Sides of the Pulaski, curated by Andrea Salerno, Fine Art in Space, Long Island City, USA
Hyping the Real, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
Realismus: Das Abenteurer der Wirklichdeit, Kunsthalle Emden, Germany
N’importe Quoi, Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, France
Back to the Future: Buy-Self, CAPC, Bordeaux, France
Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me It’s Raining, APEX Art, New York, USA
Blind Sculpture, curated by Gelitin, Greene Naftali, New York, USA
2009
Ferne Näehe, KunstMuseum, Bonn, Germany
Infinitesimal Eternity, Images Made in the Face of Spectacle, Yale School of Art, New Haven, USA
The Effect of Modern Art on Green Circles, curated by Anselm Franke, Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium
Guided By Voices, Forest City Gallery, London Ontario, Canada
The Figure and Dr Freud, Haunch of Venison, New York, USA
Chasing Napoleon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
Persona. Image. Time. Human Representation in Art: from Modernism to Present-day, The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, Russia
Nature en Kit, MUDAC, Lausanne, Switzerland
Time-Life, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, USA
Another Mythology, State National Centre of Contemporary Art Moscow, Russia
2008
Evolution, Max Lang, New York, USA
Bad Planet, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Esculturismo, la Suma de Todas, Madrid, Spain
Attention to Detail, curated by Chuck Close, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA
Faxination, curated by Bill Saylor, Gallerie LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
New Media, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
Fuck You Human, Maribel Lopez Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2007
Betes et Hommes, Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, France
Undone, Whitney Museum at Altria, New York, USA
Movement, Evolution, Art, The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, Russia
Stranger than Paradise, curated by Max Henry, Galerie Charlotee Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
I AM AS YOU WILL BE: Skeletons in Art, Cheim & Read, New York, USA
Pull My Finger, curated by Joe Zane, Allston Kirt Gallery, Boston, USA
The Power of the Physical – SCULPTURE TODAY!, Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin, Germany
Baroque Biology, with Alexis Rockman, CAC, Cincinnati, USA
Still Life, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand
2006
Hysteria Siberiana, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Arts, Lisbon, Portugal
Five Billion Years, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
The Furnace, curated by Goschka Macuga, AFoundation, Liverpool, United-Kingdom
Helter, Helter, curated by Max Henry, Galerie Anne de Villepois, Paris, France
Into Me, Out of Me, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, PS1 / MOMA, New York, USA
Contemporary Art Institute, Long Island City, USA
Create Your Own Museum, Gary atintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2005
Self Preservation Society, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
Leaving Cockaigne, Leo Koenig Inc., New York, USA
It’ll Cost You..., curated by Beth Rudin DeWoddy, Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, New York, USA
Fairy Tales Forever, Homage to H.C. Andersen, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
Figure It Out, Hudson Valley Center For ContemporaryArt, Peekskill, USA
The Altoids Collection, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, USA
Baroque and Neo-Baroque. The Hell of the Beautiful, The Domus Artium 2, Centre of Contemporary Art of Salamanca, Spain
We Can Do It!, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2004
Needful Things: Recent Multiples, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Altered States, Leo Koenig Inc., USA
Making VIsible, Galerie Faurschou, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Ten Commandments, Die Zehn Gebote, Hygiene Museum, Dresden, Germany
I am the Walrus, curated by Jan Avgikos, Cheim & Reid Gallery, New York USA
Beautiful Grotesque, Riva Gallery, New York, USA
What is Art Good For? 100 x Kunst am Karlsplatz, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria
Five Billion Years, Swiss Institute, curated by Marc Olivier, New York, USA
Extra, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Swiss Institute, New York, USA
The Uncanny, curated by Mike Kelley, Tate, Liverpool, United-Kingdom
Metamorphosis, John Michael Koehler Arts Center, Sheboygan, USA
2003
101 Treasures of The Cranbrook Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, USA
The Fourth Sex, curated by Francesco Bonami, MOCA Chicago, USA
100 Artists, 100 T-Shirts, Daniel Silverstein Gallery, New York, USA
Instructions, curated by Gerald Matt, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria
PLOP - Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund, curated by Tom Eccles, outside installations, New York, USA
Liquid Sky, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, FRAC, Dijon, France
Narcissus, CRAC Alsace, curated by Hilde Teerlinck Altkirch, France
Extra, curated by Marc-Oliver Wahler, Swiss Institute, New York, USA
There’s Always Tomorrow, Bologna, Italy
2002
Artemis, Greenberg can Doren Gallery, New York, USA
Barrocos y Neobarrocos, El Infierno De Lo Bello, Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain
Neonopolis, Leo Koenig, Las Vegas, USA
The Dubrow Biennial, Kogan Martos Gallery, New York, USA
2001
Vrai que Nature, CAPC, Bordeaux, France
The Americans, Barbican Center, London, United-Kingdom
Come On, Feel The Noise, Asbaek, Copenhagen, Denmark
2000
Climbing the Walls Thinking it Mights Be a Way Out, Robert Birch Gallery, Toronto, Canada
The Greenhouse Effect, Serpentine Gallery, London, United-Kingdom
Greater New York, PS1, Long Island City, USA
Nothing, Andrew Kreps, New York, USA
Small World, MOCA, San Diego, USA
Over the Edges: the Corners of Gent, curated by Jan Hoet, S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium
1999
True West, curated by Jason Murison, PPOW, New York, USA
Holding Court, curated by Keith Tyson, Entwistle, London, United-Kingdom
In the Public Realm, organized by the Public Art Fund, New York, USA
1998
Beyond the Monument, organized by the the Public Art Fund, Metrotech, Brooklyn, USA
Yesterday Begins Tomorrow, curated by Franceso Bonami, Bard College for Curatorial Studies, New York, USA
Pop Surrealism, Aldrich Museum, USA
Spatiotemporal-Works from the Collection 1988-1998, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthalle, Sweden
Pollution, Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy
1997
To be Real, Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, USA
Bring You Own Walkman, W139, Amsterdam, The Netherland
1996
Clarity, Northern Illinois University, Chicago, USA
1995
Thesis Exhibition, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, USA
Relics, Paris
September 06 - October 06, 2018
Solo shows
2018
Real Estate Fine Art, Brooklyn, USA
I Hope All Is Well..., 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, USA
2017
Past - Life, Marlborough Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
Hera, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA
2016
Realisms, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
2015
Garden, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
Garden, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
2014
Tony Matelli, Olaf Bruening, John Miller, Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc., Moscow, Russia
Tony Matelli: New Gravity, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, USA
2013
Stephane Simoens Contemporary, Knokke, Belgium
White Flag Projects, Saint Louis, USA
Tony Matelli - A HUMAN ECHO, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway
Windows, Walls and Mirrors, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
2012
Andréhn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Tony Matelli - A HUMAN ECHO, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
Windows, Walls and Mirrors, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
2011
Falkenrot Prize 2011: Tony Matelli: Glass of Water, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Germany
Glass of Water, Selestat Bienniale, Selestat, France
2010
The Constant Now, Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Tony Matelli: Mirror Paintings, Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Mise en Abyme, Stephane Simoens Contemporary, Knokke, Belgium
2009
Yesterday, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
The Idiot, Gary Tatintsian Gallery Inc., Moscow, Russia
Life and Times, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
Abandon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
2008
Survival, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Inc., Moscow, Russia
Survival, Uppsala Kunstmuseum, Uppsala, Sweden
The Old Me, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
Self Portraits, with Phillip Akkerman, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
2007
New Works, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
2006
Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Charlotte Moser Gallery, Geneva, Switzerland
2005
Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, Paris, France
Abandon, Centre d’Arte Santa Monica, Barcelona, Spain
2004
Abandon, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria
Fucked and The Oracle, Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria
2003 Andrehn-Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Sies & Hoeke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany
2002
Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery, Paris, France
Gian Enzo Sperone, Rome Sperone Jr., Rome, Italy
Bailey Fine Art, Toronto, Canada
2001
Leo Koenig Inc., New York, USA
Art Dealers Invitational, Marseille, France
2000
Sies+ Hoeke Gallery, Dusseldorf, Germany
Ten in One Gallery, New York, USA
Torch Gallery, Amsterdam, The Netherland
Galerie du Triangle, Bordeaux, France
1999
Abandon, University of Buffalo Art Gallery, New York, USA
Andrehn Schiptjenko, Stockholm, Sweden
Basilico Fine Arts, New York, USA
1997
Basilico Fine Arts, New York, USA
Ten in One Gallery, Chicago, USA
Group shows
2018
[entro'pi?], curated by Lars Rahbek, St. Kongensgade 50, Copenhagen, Denmark
Relics, Ceysson & Bénétière, Paris, France
Landscapes After Ruskin: Redefining The Sublime, curated by Joel Sternfeld, Grey Art Gallery, New York, USA
People: Figurative Sculpture, Jeffrey Deitch Projects, New York, USA
BURNT, curated by Leo Fitzpatrick, Marlborough Contemporary, New York, USA
Objects Like Us, The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA
This Is A Pipe: Realism And The Found Object In Contemporary Art, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago, USA
Reshaped Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, Kunsthal Rotterdam, Rotterdam, The Netherlands; Kunsthalle Tubingen, Baden Puttemberg, Germany; Heydar Aliyev Center, Baku, Azerbaijan
2017
The Sunshine Eaters, Onsite Gallery, OCAD University, Toronto, Canada
Beyond Nature, Galerie Sophie Scheidecker, Paris, France
What’s Up - The Americas, Smart Fine Arts, London, United Kingdom
de tussentijd (the meantime), Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, The Netherlands
August Sun, Lamar Dodd School of Art, University of Georgia, Athen, USA
No Place Like Home, The Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Reshaped Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, Denmark; National Gallery of Australia, Parkes, Australia
Just The Facts, Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design, Milwaukee, USA
2016
SMS SOS, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
Wanderlust, The High Line, New York, USA
Ancient Echo, 10 Hanover, London, United Kingdom
Fountain of Youth, Bill Brady Gallery, Miami, USA
Summer School, Flag Art Foundation, New York, USA
Ground Control, Art Basel Miami Beach Public 2016, The Bass Museum of Art, Miami, USA
Silleteros, KINMAN, London, United Kingdom
Comme si de rien n’était (As If Nothing had Happened), Van Buuren Museum, Brussels, Belgium
Green Doesn’t Sell, Art Brussels, Sorry We Are Closed, Brussels, Belgium
Realisms, The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia
The Watermill Center, Watermill, USA
So I turned myself to face me, Marlborough Contemporary, London, United Kingdom
Fresh Cuts, Eric Firestone Gallery, East Hampton, USA
Home Improvements, Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco, USA
Forever, Bubox, Kortrijk, Belgium
Mystifiers, NCCA, Moscow, Russia
Reshaping Reality. 50 Years of Hyperrealistic Sculpture, Museo de Bellas Artes, Bilbao, Spain; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Monterrey, Mexico
2015
Greater New York, MoMA PS1, New York, USA
Unrealism, presented by Larry Gagosian and Jeffrey Deitch, The Moore Building, Miami, USA
Mutated Reality, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Bottoms Up: A Sculpture Survey, The Art Museum of the University of Kentucky, Lexington, USA
Brunch Over Troubled Water, Plutschow Gallery, Zurich, Switzerland
At the Crack of Dawn, LARM Galleri, Copenhagen, Denmark
Eagles II, Galeria Marlborough, Madrid, Spain
Seven Deadly Sins: LUST, Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art, Peekskill, USA
Condensed Matter Community, Synchrotron Radiation Center: Home of Aladdin, Stoughton, USA
2014
Walk-ins Welcome, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
Broadway Morey Boogie, Broadway Mall Association, New York, USA
Another Look at Detroit, curated by Todd Levin, Marlborough Chelsea and Marianne Bosky Gallery, New York, USA
Vintage Violence, Monya Rowe Gallery, New York, USA
About Sculpture #1, Galerie Ronaldo Anselmi, Berlin, Germany
Baroque, Kulturhuset Stadsteatern, Stockholm, Sweden
2013
Double Hamburger Deluxe, Marlborough Chelsea, New York, USA
UNCANNY, Contemporary Art Galleries, Storrs, USA
Director’s Choice 7-9-13, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
SOMETHING ABOUT A TREE, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA
A Study in Midwestern Appropriation, Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago, USA
Pizza Time!, Marlborough Broome Street, New York, USA
Beer Show, Green Gallery, Milwaukee, USA
De leur Temps 4, ADIAF, Paris, France
Quiet Works, Temple Gallery, Tyler School of Art, Temple University, Philadelphia, USA
Desire, El Segundo Museum of Art, USA
LOST (in LA), FLAX Foundation, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Art Park
Cultural Freedom in Europe, Goethe Institut and Sint Lukas Gallery, Brussels, Belgium
2012
Simulacrum, curated by Michael Goodson, Columbus College of Art and Design, Columbus, USA
He Is Transparent, Renwick Gallery, New York, USA
you, your sun and shadow, curated by Michael Jones McKean, Anderson Gallery at VCU, Richmond, USA
2011
Dark Christmas, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
December, curated by Howie Chen, Mitchell-Innes and Nash, New York, USA
Selestat Biennal, curated by Hans Dunser, Olivier Grasser, Sophie Kaplan, Pierre-Olivier Rollin and Otto Teichert, Selestat, France
echos, Musée Nissim de Camondo, Paris, France
Small, Medium, Large, curated by Francis Breist and Susanne van Hagen, Donjon, Vez, France
Pretty on the Inside, curated by Erik Parker and KAWS, Paul Kasmin Gallery, New York, NY
Sculptures, Galerie Loevenbruck, Paris, France
Personal Structures, curated by Karlyn De Jongh and Sarah Gold, 54th International Venice Biennale: ILLUMInations, Palazzo Bembo, Venice, Italy
Impossible Vacation, White Flag Projects, St. Louis, USA
Fragmentations, FRAC Pays de la Loire, Nantes, France
2010
Hunters & Gatherers, Gian Enzo Sperone, Sent, Switzerland
A vos papiers, Galerie Charlotte Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
Transcending..., LARMgalleri, Copenhagen, Denmark
Love in Vein, Gering & Lopez, New York, USA
No Show, Spencer Brownstone, New York, USA
Just Love Me, MUDAM Luxembourg, Luxembourg
The Wasteland, The White Box, New York, USA
Both Sides of the Pulaski, curated by Andrea Salerno, Fine Art in Space, Long Island City, USA
Hyping the Real, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
Realismus: Das Abenteurer der Wirklichdeit, Kunsthalle Emden, Germany
N’importe Quoi, Musee d’art contemporain de Lyon, France
Back to the Future: Buy-Self, CAPC, Bordeaux, France
Don’t Piss on Me and Tell Me It’s Raining, APEX Art, New York, USA
Blind Sculpture, curated by Gelitin, Greene Naftali, New York, USA
2009
Ferne Näehe, KunstMuseum, Bonn, Germany
Infinitesimal Eternity, Images Made in the Face of Spectacle, Yale School of Art, New Haven, USA
The Effect of Modern Art on Green Circles, curated by Anselm Franke, Vanmoerkerke Collection, Belgium
Guided By Voices, Forest City Gallery, London Ontario, Canada
The Figure and Dr Freud, Haunch of Venison, New York, USA
Chasing Napoleon, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
Persona. Image. Time. Human Representation in Art: from Modernism to Present-day, The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, Russia
Nature en Kit, MUDAC, Lausanne, Switzerland
Time-Life, Taxter & Spengemann, New York, USA
Another Mythology, State National Centre of Contemporary Art Moscow, Russia
2008
Evolution, Max Lang, New York, USA
Bad Planet, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
Esculturismo, la Suma de Todas, Madrid, Spain
Attention to Detail, curated by Chuck Close, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA
Faxination, curated by Bill Saylor, Gallerie LOYAL, Stockholm, Sweden
New Media, Stephane Simoens, Knokke, Belgium
Fuck You Human, Maribel Lopez Gallery, Berlin, Germany
2007
Betes et Hommes, Grande Halle de la Villette, Paris, France
Undone, Whitney Museum at Altria, New York, USA
Movement, Evolution, Art, The Cultural Foundation Ekaterina, Moscow, Russia
Stranger than Paradise, curated by Max Henry, Galerie Charlotee Moser, Geneva, Switzerland
I AM AS YOU WILL BE: Skeletons in Art, Cheim & Read, New York, USA
Pull My Finger, curated by Joe Zane, Allston Kirt Gallery, Boston, USA
The Power of the Physical – SCULPTURE TODAY!, Georg-Kolbe-Museum, Berlin, Germany
Baroque Biology, with Alexis Rockman, CAC, Cincinnati, USA
Still Life, Dunedin Public Art Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand
2006
Hysteria Siberiana, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Cristina Guerra Contemporary Arts, Lisbon, Portugal
Five Billion Years, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, France
The Furnace, curated by Goschka Macuga, AFoundation, Liverpool, United-Kingdom
Helter, Helter, curated by Max Henry, Galerie Anne de Villepois, Paris, France
Into Me, Out of Me, curated by Klaus Biesenbach, PS1 / MOMA, New York, USA
Contemporary Art Institute, Long Island City, USA
Create Your Own Museum, Gary atintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2005
Self Preservation Society, Leo Koenig Inc, New York, USA
Leaving Cockaigne, Leo Koenig Inc., New York, USA
It’ll Cost You..., curated by Beth Rudin DeWoddy, Kathleen Cullen Fine Arts, New York, USA
Fairy Tales Forever, Homage to H.C. Andersen, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark
Figure It Out, Hudson Valley Center For ContemporaryArt, Peekskill, USA
The Altoids Collection, Blue Star Contemporary Art Center, San Antonio, USA
Baroque and Neo-Baroque. The Hell of the Beautiful, The Domus Artium 2, Centre of Contemporary Art of Salamanca, Spain
We Can Do It!, Gary Tatintsian Gallery, Moscow, Russia
2004
Needful Things: Recent Multiples, The Cleveland Museum of Art, Cleveland, Ohio Altered States, Leo Koenig Inc., USA
Making VIsible, Galerie Faurschou, Copenhagen, Denmark
The Ten Commandments, Die Zehn Gebote, Hygiene Museum, Dresden, Germany
I am the Walrus, curated by Jan Avgikos, Cheim & Reid Gallery, New York USA
Beautiful Grotesque, Riva Gallery, New York, USA
What is Art Good For? 100 x Kunst am Karlsplatz, Kunsthalle Wien, Austria
Five Billion Years, Swiss Institute, curated by Marc Olivier, New York, USA
Extra, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, Swiss Institute, New York, USA
The Uncanny, curated by Mike Kelley, Tate, Liverpool, United-Kingdom
Metamorphosis, John Michael Koehler Arts Center, Sheboygan, USA
2003
101 Treasures of The Cranbrook Museum, Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, USA
The Fourth Sex, curated by Francesco Bonami, MOCA Chicago, USA
100 Artists, 100 T-Shirts, Daniel Silverstein Gallery, New York, USA
Instructions, curated by Gerald Matt, Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria
PLOP - Recent Projects of the Public Art Fund, curated by Tom Eccles, outside installations, New York, USA
Liquid Sky, curated by Marc-Olivier Wahler, FRAC, Dijon, France
Narcissus, CRAC Alsace, curated by Hilde Teerlinck Altkirch, France
Extra, curated by Marc-Oliver Wahler, Swiss Institute, New York, USA
There’s Always Tomorrow, Bologna, Italy
2002
Artemis, Greenberg can Doren Gallery, New York, USA
Barrocos y Neobarrocos, El Infierno De Lo Bello, Domus Artium, Salamanca, Spain
Neonopolis, Leo Koenig, Las Vegas, USA
The Dubrow Biennial, Kogan Martos Gallery, New York, USA
2001
Vrai que Nature, CAPC, Bordeaux, France
The Americans, Barbican Center, London, United-Kingdom
Come On, Feel The Noise, Asbaek, Copenhagen, Denmark
2000
Climbing the Walls Thinking it Mights Be a Way Out, Robert Birch Gallery, Toronto, Canada
The Greenhouse Effect, Serpentine Gallery, London, United-Kingdom
Greater New York, PS1, Long Island City, USA
Nothing, Andrew Kreps, New York, USA
Small World, MOCA, San Diego, USA
Over the Edges: the Corners of Gent, curated by Jan Hoet, S.M.A.K., Gent, Belgium
1999
True West, curated by Jason Murison, PPOW, New York, USA
Holding Court, curated by Keith Tyson, Entwistle, London, United-Kingdom
In the Public Realm, organized by the Public Art Fund, New York, USA
1998
Beyond the Monument, organized by the the Public Art Fund, Metrotech, Brooklyn, USA
Yesterday Begins Tomorrow, curated by Franceso Bonami, Bard College for Curatorial Studies, New York, USA
Pop Surrealism, Aldrich Museum, USA
Spatiotemporal-Works from the Collection 1988-1998, Magasin 3, Stockholm Konsthalle, Sweden
Pollution, Claudia Gian Ferrari Arte Contemporanea, Milan, Italy
1997
To be Real, Center for the Arts at Yerba Buena Gardens, San Francisco, USA
Bring You Own Walkman, W139, Amsterdam, The Netherland
1996
Clarity, Northern Illinois University, Chicago, USA
1995
Thesis Exhibition, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, USA
