ART CITIES:N.York-Rebecca Warren
Rebecca Warren is a sculptor working in a variety of materials, including clay, bronze, and steel. She also constructs vitrines and wall-based collages using neon, wool, pompoms, paper, thread, and less identifiable materials. Her bronze and unfired-clay sculptures are protean, corporeal presences. Sometimes cartoonish or eroticized, they are like beings made from parts of other beings, or figures in different postures at different times.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Matthew Marks Gallery Archive
Rebecca Warren’s solo exhibiton “V” consists of eleven sculptures in hand-painted bronze, including slender totemic sculptures and smaller, more intimate works on pedestals, all of which are being shown for the first time. Warren’s sculptures range from figuration to abstraction and from amorphous to more clearly recognisable forms, which are sometimes cartoonish or eroticised. Always evident in Warren’s work is the negotiation between thought and process. Ideas about authorship and authenticity and influences from literature, psychology, pop culture and art history are filtered, distorted and often discarded as they find three-dimensional form. Her sculptures can be tender and droll. She often manages to both invoke and skewer the work of familiar male artists like Willem de Kooning, Lucio Fontana, Alberto Giacometti and cartoonist R. Crumb. However, while acknowledging a debt to certain key elements of Modernist sculpture, her work also re-engages with them in order to produce new modes. Warren has said of these new works, “I wanted them to be somehow denser than previous bronzes in order to integrate them more completely with their painted surfaces, making them more concentrated, more intense.” Many of the sculptures are painted with shapes and symbols that, as Warren suggests, “might stand as an obscure ancient or alien language. Together they might form either a series of separate impenetrable fragments or one single message or communication of some sort”. Born in 1965 in London, Rebecca Warren received an MFA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1993. The following year, she was artist-in-residence at the Ruskin School, Oxford University. Known for her works in clay and bronze, Warren’s sculptures ebb from figuration to abstraction, ranging from the amorphous to more clearly recognisable forms. In 2011, Warren was included in the 54th Venice Biennale. Rebecca Warren was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2006. In 2009 a major exhibition of her work was held at the Serpentine Gallery, London (cat.) and this year she has been included in the 54th Venice Biennale. Recently she has had concurrent solo shows at The Renaissance Society at The University of Chicago and The Art Institute of Chicago, 2010. Her work was included in the Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London, 2006 and in 2004 a solo exhibition, Dark Passage, was held at the Kunsthalle Zurich, Zurich (cat.). Warren’s work has also appeared in exhibitions at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, Barbican Art Gallery, London, Palais de Tokyo, Paris and the New Museum, New York. In 2008 she was nominated for The Vincent Award. Rebecca Warren lives and works in London.
Photo: Rebecca Warren, Pas De Deux 2005, Mixed media vitrine and Perspex, 18 × 54⅜ × 11¼ inches; 46 × 138 × 29 cm, © Rebecca Warren, Courtesy the artist and Matthew Marks Gallery
Info: Matthew Marks Gallery, 522 West 22nd Street, New York, Duration: 18/3-1/5/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://matthewmarks.com
