NYAB Event - Richard Dupont Exhibition

Richard Dupont Exhibition

Carolina Nitsch Project Room

This event has ended.

Carolina Nitsch presents an exhibition of new work by Richard Dupont, opening May 5th at Carolina Nitsch Project Room, 534 W. 22nd St, New York. This will mark his second solo show with the gallery.

Dupont’s artistic output to date has taken his own body and the social landscape as starting points, resulting in sculptures, prints, installations and public projects that merge the individual and the collective, and revive aspects of figurative sculpture. Beginning with his 2004 visit to The Wright- Patterson Air Force Base, to participate in an anthropometry study that resulted in a full body scan, Dupont’s anthropological approach has emphasized the interdependence of social and individual processes in the co-construction of meaning. His use of archaic and classical figurative forms in conjunction with contemporary concerns also emphasizes the interdependence of historical precedents and our current situation.

Departing from previous installations, this exhibition will present a series of new sculptural works that take a more experimental approach to process and materials. Having previously deconstructed the body vis-à-vis the works derived from the laser scan, these new sculptures find Dupont reconstructing body forms out of material residue. An encyclopedic catalog of both art and non-art materials including a ten year accumulation of studio and personal detritus as well as daily waste, salvaged objects and foodstuffs are reincorporated into large molds and bonded permanently together using an archival resin. The historical motif of the self portrait bust is upended in these works, as the physiognomy gives way to the terms of the sculptural process. The material content within each piece varies dramatically, and, seen collectively, represent a dense and contradictory compression of time and meaning.

Also included in the installation are new sculptures based on casts of various bag shapes. Installed on the floor contrapuntally to the classical busts above, these verisimilar works are also cast out of solid archival polyurethane resin. Their clear, transparent surfaces mimic the ubiquitous clear garbage bag of today. Within these solid castings are accumulations of detritus, visible through their clear surfaces, but permanently frozen in time. Their formless, abject shapes echo the body both formally and conceptually. If Dupont’s earlier work represented the cultural forces acting upon the body externally, these new works reveal the internal contamination. The body/machine of late capitalist consumption is portrayed here, and defined by the waste product of that consumption. However, these works also have a vivid, gem-like quality, and a clear reference to the ambiguous domain of Pop and The Readymade. The heavy, solid forms give material substance and permanence to the ephemera and waste of everyday life, and reveal a sculptural strategy of transformation, regeneration and renewal.

Richard Dupont was born in 1968 in New York. He currently lives and works in New York.