Luhring Augustine is pleased to present a selection of new and recent sculptures by Richard Rezac in our Tribeca location. This will be the artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery; his first show in 2020 at the Chelsea gallery was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
The title of the exhibition, Pleat, simultaneously refers to and contradicts the hardness of the materials used in this group of works, while underscoring the idea of the multiplicity of surfaces, forms, and perspectives apparent within them. The suggestive nature of the sculptures is a defining characteristic of Rezac’s practice, presenting the viewer with objects that are completely novel, yet connote everyday sources, leaving the viewer with a sense of familiarity and closeness. Collectively, the works invite the viewer to rigorously contemplate the implied meanings, contexts, and references evoked in the intense and often playful dialogue between form, material, and color.
Rezac’s abstract sculptures are rooted in a studious consideration of the history of art, architecture, and design. Exceptionally precise in their execution, with each decision carefully considered by the artist, they 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.
About the Artist
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 BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead, UK; the show originated at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin, and was previously on view at 49 Nord 6 Est, Lorraine, France. 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; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA; 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.
