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February Issue 2006
Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, Offers Works by Robert Lazzarini
VantagePoint
V: Robert Lazzarini
will be on view at the Mint Museum of Art in Charlotte, NC, from
Feb. 25 through July 16, 2006.
Remaking familiar objects and manipulating their forms in seemingly impossible ways, New York sculptor Robert Lazzarini leaves you questioning what is real and what isn't.
"Lazzarini makes some of the strangest, most mind-altering objects you will ever see," wrote Washington Post staff writer Blake Gopnik in a 2003 art review. "This contemporary artist seems to actually bend the fabric of the world, so that even our perceptions of it start to crack."
For this fifth installment of the VantagePoint (VantagePoint is the Mint Museum of Art's ongoing series of contemporary exhibitions emphasizing the range of exploration and new developments in recent art practice) series at the Mint Museum of Art, Curator of Contemporary Art Carla Hanzal identified Lazzarini for a solo exhibition. In 2004, Lazzarini was featured in the Revelation: A Fresh Look at Contemporary Collections exhibition organized by Hanzal at the Mint Museum of Art. The interest generated by three of Lazzarini' s sculptures inspired this subsequent show presenting a larger, more comprehensive survey of the artist's work.
Lazzarini' s sculptures investigate hyper-realism, but his use of a skewed perspective, "elongating" an object through planar distortion, offers a new interpretation of familiar objects such as a violin, a chair or a hammer. Fabricated with amazing veracity, yet extremely distorted, these ubiquitous objects appear to be pulled by some strange effect of gravity. Modeled on actual objects found in the artist's studio or the urban landscape, the sculptures are fabricated from actual wood, metal, plastic and bone, and are finished so that they bear the imprint of use.
VantagePoint V will feature 10 of Lazzarini's sculptures. The earliest piece in the exhibition, violin, is based on a rare 1693 Stradivarius, representing the technical perfection of a hand-built instrument. Lazzarini' s tour-de-force sculpture of a 1980s-era Bell Atlantic public telephone, entitled payphone, was first presented at the Whitney Museum of Art. A series of skulls also reveals Lazzarini's interest in vanitas, the 17th century still life tradition of painting objects such as skulls, clocks and flowers that convey an acute sense of life's fleeting nature. Another series of sculptures references the artist's studio, a place of toil and intense mental and psychological concentration. The most recent sculpture in the exhibition, table, notebook and pencil, is one of several sculptures from Lazzarini's studio series.
Lazzarini's approach
to object-making is unique in that he combines traditional processes
with advanced technology to create sculptures that are at once
haunting and iconic. Beginning with a digital scan of the object,
he manipulates and distorts the image by using computer-assisted
design and animation programs. Lazzarini exhausts many possibilities
in determining how the sculpture will exist as an image as well
as a tangible object. Once he decides upon the configuration,
he then translates the two-dimensional design into the virtual
geometry of the object. He creates a three-dimensional model of
the sculpture using rapid prototyping, a method of computer-generated
model-making. These models serve as the basis for the final sculptures
which Lazzarini fabricates.
The construction process can involve collaborating with as many
as 45 different fabricators, as was the case in creating payphone.
Lazzarini then oversees the assembly of the separate parts and
painstakingly finishes the sculpture by hand, so that the intense
industrial process is balanced with a handmade aspect. The resulting
objects are a combination of objectivity and subjectivity, evoking
a strange sensation as the viewer tries to rectify their unsettling
distortions, defying the world of physical objects as we know
it.
Lazzarini will speak about his exhibition on Feb. 26, 2006, at 3pm in the Van Every Auditorium at the Mint Museum of Art. This lecture is open to the public and free with museum admission. For more listings of educational activities, consult The Mint Museums' website at (www.mintmuseum.org).
For more information
check our NC Institutional Gallery listings, call the museum at
704/337-2000 or on the web at (www.mintmuseum.org).
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