bronze Archives

Thomas Lerooy
Beauty in the Shadow of the Stars
Petit Palais, Paris, France [link]
March 25 – July 5, 2015

Belgian artist Lerooy creates subversive interventions with exquisitely cast figurative sculptures displayed amongst the permanent collection at Petit Palais. With Duchampian prankster spirit, Lerooy uses the formal elements and materials associated with classical high art, but conceptually thwarts the viewers’ expectations, playing upon the relationship between beauty and the grotesque. From a distance, Seduction of Destruction appears as a decorative series of glass/gold leafed vessels. Up close, we see glass bottles filled with bronzed fragments of faces punctured by bronzed asparagus spears. In other works, Lerooy humorously uses duct as a comment about “Institutions” desire to preserve history and tradition.

~ Colette Copeland
images by author

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Erwin Wurm
Kiss (Abstract Sculptures)
Synthesa @ Lehmann Maupin, Chelsea, NY [link]
February 28 – April 19, 2014

Presented atop gallery-white pedestals, Erwin Wurm’s figurative objects stand wistfully erect. Wurm’s sculptures allude to a cheap liaison, formally reminiscent of a kitsch dolphins statuette, triumphantly erupting out of their simulated ocean. These cast-bronze “casings”, painted with matte, fleshy-like mauve acrylic, conduct dual associations in scale and metaphor: what are franks are served up as phalluses, what are deli meats perform as human limbs. Functioning like surrealist poetry where disparate objects and behaviors are incongruously aligned, the girth of the objects’ romance is implied by the degree of the “meat’s” actual entanglement.

~ Amie Cunat

photo courtesy of Lehmann Maupin Gallery