Keith Edmier “Mother Mold”

Keith Edmier “Mother Mold”

Petzel Gallery (35 E 67th St.)

This event has ended.

Petzel Gallery presents Mother Mold, a survey exhibition of sculpture by Keith Edmier, opening on the artist’s 50th birthday. Ranging from Edmier’s earliest works, such as I Met a Girl Who Sang the Blues (1991) through Imagines (2017), Mother Mold presents a select overview of Edmier’s work from the past twenty-six years.

The installation Imagines (2017), comprises fifty life-cast portraits displayed like the ancient Roman life masks known by the same title. One portrait is hung for every year in the artist’s life, with four self-portraits of the artist at different ages. Stemming from his years in Hollywood working as a special effects make-up artist, Edmier’s cast portraits connect in intimate ways: they portray the artist’s family, friends, heroes, and influences. The connection to Hollywood turns the permanence and memorial of the life mask into a starting point for the transformation to come. Michael Jackson becomes a teenage werewolf, Jeff Goldblum—The Fly, David Bowie—a New Wave vampire, and Matthew Barney—a well-groomed Satyr. As in all of Edmier’s work, one can find familiar identities and structures reshaped and transformed.

This will be the artist’s sixth solo exhibition at the gallery and his first in our Upper East Side location. The exhibition is accompanied by a publication that details his most recent installation, Imagines.

Media

• Sculpture

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