FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

BARRY X BALL

JANUARY 11 - FEBRUARY 8, 1997

Luhring Augustine is pleased to announce a one-person exhibition by Barry X Ball which opens on January 11 and runs through February 8, 1997.   The artist will show recent sculpture as well as a monumental wall-relief entitled A Profusion of Loss.

The sculptures were all created during the past year and exhibit the conceptual and technical sophistication, the perfectionistic attention to detail, and the obsessive intensity that have been a constant in the artist’s work. The complex and intricate black and white surfaces of the works are produced by an innovative fabrication method  which ultimately results in meticulously hand finished sculptures.   When installed, they are suspended from floor-to-ceiling by stainless steel cables and custom-made hardware.  The works are redolent of historical antecedents from Tuscan Gothic architecture, to Gianlorenzo Bernini’s spiral columns, to futurist and minimal sculpture.

A Profusion of Loss is Barry X Ball’s largest work to date.  The work is a meditation on Leonardo da Vinci’s great unfinished-and-now-destroyed The Battle of Anghiari.  Ball’s piece was created for the 1995 exhibition, Double Mixte, at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume in Paris.  This will be its inaugural public showing in the United States.  A brief descriptive essay on the work written by the artist is available at the gallery.

Barry X Ball lives and works in New York.  This is his first full-gallery one-person show of his work in 9 years. For the last several  years, he has exhibited primarily in Europe.  His work is represented in many public and private international collections.

A concurrent and complementary virtual installation project by the artist for the second issue of Tr@verses, the on-line journal of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, can be viewed from January through April at http://www.cnac-gp.fr/traverses.

For further information, please contact Michele Maccarone at (212) 219-9600.