Richard Rezac Exhibition

Luhring Augustine Gallery

[Image: Richard Rezac "Chigi, Pamphili" (2019) Aluminum, painted cast bronze, and woven cotton 25 1/2 x 26 1/2 x 10 1/2 in.]

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Luhring Augustine presents a solo exhibition of new and recent work by sculptor Richard Rezac. On view at the gallery’s Chelsea location will be a selection of works that demonstrate the breadth of Rezac’s sculptural practice including floor, wall, and ceiling pieces. Recalling familiar forms, the works engage our memory and inspire material associations, while eluding easy recognition. This will be the artist’s first exhibition with Luhring Augustine; it also marks his first show in New York in over a decade.

Rezac’s abstract sculptures are rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design. Originally trained as a painter, Rezac has said that his work “behaves like a painting”, the sculptures hovering in a place between representation and direct presentation, existing simultaneously as both images and objects. His background in painting is also apparent in his masterful use of color, which is a touchstone of his oeuvre – the palette he chooses for each work is at times bold and vibrant, at others subtle and natural in tone.

The sculptures quietly connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by Rezac, the sculptures are made to be looked at and thought of with absorption. Their human scale and careful placement (the height on the wall, the distance they hang from the ceiling, etc.) initiates a dialogue that demands time, the works revealing themselves slowly. This combination of exquisite craft and spatial intentionality imparts a knowing presence to the sculptures, lending an ostensible sense that they are full of concealed information. Taciturn, earnest, and magnetic, they toggle between congruence and dissonance, space and form, lightness and solidity.

Richard Rezac (born 1952) lives and works in Chicago. In 2018, The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, IL presented Address, an exhibition of Rezac’s work from three decades that garnered enormous critical attention; the exhibition traveled to the Blaffer Art Museum at the University of Houston, TX. Rezac’s work is currently featured in The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue at 49 Nord 6 Est, Lorraine, France; the show originated at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and will travel to the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK. His work is in the permanent collections of The Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Portland Art Museum, OR; Detroit Institute of Art, MI; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT; among several others. He has received the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Rome Prize Fellowship at the American Academy in Rome, the Joan Mitchell Foundation Award, and the Louis Comfort Tiffany Award, among others.