D’Amelio Terras, New York
October 4 – November 1, 2008
D’Amelio Terras is pleased to present three new sculptures by gallery artist Nicole Cherubini. These large-scale pieces address compartmentalized processes of the clay tradition through Cherubini’s exploratory merging of raw building materials, structural forms and surface ornamentation.
Cherubini’s sculptures have been built by stacking clay forms on top of uncoated MDF, plywood, hunks of marble and alabaster. Turquoise tiles, spin-art cubes and pinched clay wreaths tether wooden armatures and grotesquely oversized Eva Hesse-inspired handles. Cherubini also employs the sturdy finished frames of 2-D digital collages as structural supports. These drawings render Greek pottery erased, painted over, and juxtaposed against the warped walls of 19th century George Ohr pots.
The works are the result of relentless processes — minerals milled and mixed, wood sawed and bolted and pots dropped and topped with elegant shapes thrown on the wheel and hand-pressed into molds. Terracotta, earthenware and porcelain interlope and loop with one another marking distinctions between building matter. Cherubini references the radical acts of another pair of 19th century potters, the Brothers Kirkpatrick, as she constructs new contours relapsing and recoiling into 2000-year-old shapes of ancient Greek vessels.
Glaze becomes line, activating the marks of the artist. The drips are quick to bring attention to sharply cut holes that Cherubini excavates only to graft elsewhere on her pieces. Glaze pools into the shallow impressions of her finger-prodding and coagulates into a subtle earthy palette accented with metallic luster.
Nicole Cherubini’s concurrent solo exhibition is on view at Smith-Stewart in New York through November 16, 2008. In 2009, she will be featured in “Dirt on Delight” at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, which will travel to the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN. Her upcoming exhibitions also include: the Contemporary Arts Forum, Santa Barbara, CA; the Santa Monica Museum of Art, Santa Monica, CA; and a collaborative exhibition with Taylor Davis at the List Visual Arts Center at MIT, Cambridge, MA. Past exhibitions include: the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia, PA; Samson Projects, Boston, MA; P.S. 1/MoMA, Long Island City, NY; D’Amelio Terras, New York; Galerie Michael Janssen, Berlin; and The Sculpture Center, New York.
