By means of December 23, 2022, Nino Mier Gallery will existing Arrangements, our initial solo exhibition with New York based mostly artist Tony Matelli. The exhibition will debut a new collection of self-portraits and incorporate 8 new polychrome bronze bouquets of inverted flowers.
Matelli’s perspectival reorientations of objects and tips are most felt in his Arrangement sequence, exactly where commonplace bouquets of flowers are upended and reified into miraculous and meticulously created sculptures. These performs – comprising kaleidoscopic tulips, fragile rubber band-certain lilies, potted orchids, and lively tropicals and wildflowers – have been reworked into common cast bronze and exquisitely painted. The operates, normally resting on a single petal, bear no load from their gravitational sublimation just about as images or suggestions, these sculptures are reinstated on the pedestal as if the regulations of nature that contains them were being intact—yet inverted—around them.
This reorientation of notion is transposed into the psychic place of Matelli’s new collection of self-portraits, similarly titled Arrangement. Hyper-realistically rendered in silicone, the sculptures depict the artist standing contrapposto and in studio garments, his disembodied head resting atop his neck. The is effective are meditations on the act of wanting, the act of thinking, and the strange and phantasmagoric encounter of the head separating from its overall body. This moment—a phenomenon locked within—is externalized in Arrangement, produced both disturbing and superb in its meticulous accounting of each element.
Matelli is acknowledged for his conceptual assortment and material dexterity, moving deftly from uncanny, lifetime-sizing figurative works to exacting and miraculous reorientations of popular objects. For 25 yrs, Matelli’s artistic fears have centered close to the human affliction, imbuing his sculptures with a shocking vulnerability. This quality can be found in the most not likely of objects, such as his polychrome bronze weeds. His much more specifically figurative is effective are permeated by social problems of alienation, displacement and transformation, exemplified by earlier works this kind of as Josh, a determine in a floating fugue-condition the 50 percent-nude Sleepwalker, shed on New York City’s Higher-line and his Backyard garden sequence of broken and crumbling classical figures, adorned by an imperishable and vibrant variety of fresh food—rendered in painted bronze and glass—offered in the two defacement and sacrifice.
