Mel Kendrick: Cutting Corners
7 March – 13 April 2024
David Nolan Gallery
24 East 81 Street, New York
Mel Kendrick (b. 1949, Boston; permanent collections include the Met, MoMA, and the Whitney) will present Cutting Corners, a solo exhibition of all-new sculptures, following a five-decade career retrospective that culminated at the Parrish Museum in 2023.
Since moving to New York in 1971 with roommate Carroll Dunham, Mel Kendrick has established himself as a preeminent American sculptor, known for his rejection of narratives and allusions in favor of works that are self-contained and self-referential. Kendrick transforms single blocks of wood into reconfigured wholes, carving parts from the whole only to reassemble them atop or alongside the excavated base. In this elegant economy of both form and material, nothing is ever wasted, nor is anything added; each block is a question that contains its own answer. The result is something akin to a visual fugue: independent geometric systems are built up within a single composition to create a complex and dazzling harmonic whole, celebrating and complicating their own material and conceptual logic.
Though often mentioned in relation to artists such as Sol LeWitt for his conceptual underpinnings, Dorothea Rockburne for her mathematically driven processes, Eva Hesse for her expansive use of materials, and Martin Puryear for his minimalist treatment of wood, Kendrick remains a singular figure in his open and experimental approach to what he has called “drawing within a material.”
More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download high-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title.
