Robert Mallary “Sculptor”

Allan Stone Projects

poster for Robert Mallary “Sculptor”

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Allan Stone Projects presents Mallary Sculptor, an exhibition of nine works from 1959 to 1966, the period in which he established himself in New York as a central figure in the Neo-Dadaist assemblage and junk art movement that followed on the heels of Abstract Expressionism. In an idiosyncratically dark vocabulary, he combined fragments from his surroundings with the pioneering use of resin to create moody, allusive meditations on the nature of materiality and the contemplation of transience.

Resin provided a physical permanence and a means to present fragile, fragmentary and eroded subjects: trash, cardboard, cloth and clothing, gravel and dirt, wood scraps. By melding such diverse and humble sources with polyester resin as a binding agent, Mallary sought to reconcile structure, gesture and content, in ways not unlike his abstract expressionist forebearer Franz Kline, whose paintings combined energetic brush work with architectonic forms originally inspired by his surroundings.

While his work had intuitive, dynamic and experiential qualities akin to Abstract Expressionism, Mallary’s interest in the associative potential of materials, their physical presence and allusive effects, distinguished him as a unique voice among the varied artistic experimentations in New York of the late-1950s and 1960s. In 1959 Mallary was included in two Museum of Modern Art exhibitions Sculpture U.S.A. and Sixteen Americans, followed by a 1960 Guggenheim International Award and exhibition. In 1961, Mallary’s work was featured in Life magazine and the Museum of Modern Art exhibition Art of Assemblage. At Allan Stone Gallery he had three solo shows in the 60s and a group show with sculptors John Anderson, Cesar and John Chamberlain. By 1968, Mallary was also included in five annuals at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the VII Bienal de Sao Paolo, the Seattle and New York World’s Fairs, and had a retrospective at SUNY Potsdam.

Mallary’s use of new polymers and plastics in combination with overtly low-tech materials expanded creative inroads for both technology and democratized sources. By assimilating dirt and grime in his works and surmounting thier effects, he assimilated time and entropy as subjects, claiming them as part of the content of the work. His works’ anthropomorphic references and undercurrents of doom, both in the imagery and in titles sourced from classical mythology, invoked enduring ideological quandaries. Ultimately, the significance of Mallary’s work persists because of the transitory nature of its origins, a condition that resonates in its paradox.

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Schedule

from April 24, 2014 to June 27, 2014
Hours: By appointment

Artist(s)

Robert Mallary

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