Via December 23, 2022, Nino Mier Gallery will provide Preparations, our first solo exhibition with New York based totally artist Tony Matelli. The exhibition will debut a brand new sequence of self-portraits and come with 8 new polychrome bronze bouquets of inverted vegetation.
Matelli’s perspectival reorientations of gadgets and concepts are maximum felt in his Association sequence, the place common bouquets of vegetation are upended and reified into miraculous and meticulously built sculptures. Those works – comprising kaleidoscopic tulips, subtle rubber band-bound lilies, potted orchids, and colourful tropicals and wildflowers – were reworked into conventional forged bronze and exquisitely painted. The works, continuously resting upon a unmarried petal, undergo no load from their gravitational sublimation; nearly as photographs or concepts, those sculptures are reinstated upon the pedestal as though the regulations of nature containing them have been intact—but inverted—round them.
This reorientation of belief is transposed into the psychic house of Matelli’s new sequence of self-portraits, likewise titled Association. Hyper-realistically rendered in silicone, the sculptures depict the artist status contrapposto and in studio garments, his disembodied head resting atop his neck. The works are meditations at the act of taking a look, the act of pondering, and the abnormal and phantasmagoric revel in of the thoughts isolating from its frame. This second—a phenomenon locked inside—is externalized in Association, made each traumatic and implausible in its meticulous accounting of each and every element.
Matelli is understood for his conceptual vary and subject material dexterity, shifting deftly from uncanny, life-size figurative works to exacting and miraculous reorientations of not unusual gadgets. For 25 years, Matelli’s creative issues have focused across the human situation, imbuing his sculptures with a shocking vulnerability. This high quality may also be discovered in probably the most not likely of gadgets, comparable to his polychrome bronze weeds. His extra at once figurative works are permeated via social issues of alienation, displacement and transformation, exemplified via previous works comparable to Josh, a determine in a floating fugue-state; the half-nude Sleepwalker, misplaced on New York Town’s Prime-line; and his Lawn sequence of damaged and crumbling classical figures, decorated via an imperishable and colourful vary of clean meals—rendered in painted bronze and glass—presented in each defacement and sacrifice.