New Image Sculpture

Organized by the McNay’s Chief Curator and Curator of Art after 1945, New Image Sculpture assembles works by emerging and mid-career artists who freely appropriate from art history, ethnographic artifacts, fashion, folk art, hobby crafts, popular culture, and the world of do-it-yourself. These artists transform widely available materials, many found on the shelves of hardware stores and building suppliers, into fanciful re-creations and interpretations of ordinary and mundane things. Styrofoam, corrugated cardboard, and duct tape replace marble and bronze as primary materials, while ersatz tractors, musical instruments, sofas, and suitcases take the place previously held by portrait busts or minimalist cubes.

Drawing on art movements including Dada, Nouveau Réalisme, Arte Povera, and Pop art, as well as various other developments in realism, these disparate artists all use recognizable imagery and common materials. Often fabrication techniques are conspicuous as an element of the finished work. Some artists employ labor-intensive and obsessive approaches, emphasizing craft and the handmade with obvious evidence of the artist’s process, despite the use of ephemeral materials.

The 13 artists and artist collectives in New Image Sculpture create unique visions of the world we encounter on a dailybasis. Regardless of what they make or how they make it, inthe end these artists transform ordinary stuff into objects ofextraordinary engagement.

A full-color, 128-page book surveying the work of these artists, with text by the exhibition’s organizer René Paul Barilleaux and critic Eleanor Heartney, accompanies the New Image Sculpture exhibition.