Locks Gallery is pleased to present THENCE, an exhibition of new and old works by New York-based artist Rob Wynne. This exhibition pairs recent poured-glass wall sculptures with earlier mixed-media works connecting themes throughout his career, such as reflection, appropriation, disorientation, and the materiality of language.
Often using found words and imagery, Wynne’s work features snippets of dialogue and phrases drawn from poems, conversations, and the artist’s diary entries (where he records things overheard, said in passing, or from dialogue in books and films). His collection of whimsies and poignant moments of exchange are reconfigured into his art to create unexpected, playful and often humorous engagements with the viewer, inviting us to reconsider literal interpretations of language. In his glass pieces, the scale of letters are aggrandized and contracted, accentuating their drama and altering their meaning. As put by critic Michael Duncan, “Wynne strips away the identities of the texts and images he appropriates. Free from the baggage, he uses his appropriations as revealing koans to praise and challenge the glories and mysteries of art.”
Wynne has created his glass wall sculptures since the 1990s, each composed of hand poured, mirrored-glass elements. Recalling their origin, the artist has said, “A ladle of molten glass slipped out of my hand and spilled onto the floor, making a huge splat…it was a kind of cosmic explosion…that led me to realize I that I could actually control it and start making actual letters out of it.” Each piece is made in a labor-intensive, multi-step process resulting in glimmering, seductive, and irregularly-shaped compositions offering a personal touch that is absent in other text works by contemporaneous artists such as Jenny Holzer or Barbara Kruger. Both in materiality and subject matter, Wynne’s glass and mixed media works demonstrate his mastery of contradiction and keen ability to make art from the momentary.
Rob Wynne (b. 1948) is an American sculptor and installation artist who has exhibited throughout the US and abroad, with solo gallery exhibitions in Paris, Geneva, and New York. His work has been featured in exhibitions at the McNay Art Museum, TX; P.S.1 Institute for Contemporary Art, NY; Long Beach Museum of Art, CA; The Drawing Center, NY; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA. Wynne's work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; The Museum of Modern Art, NY; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Centre Pompidou, France; The Norton Museum of Art, FL; the Columbus Museum of Art, OH; and the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Paris. He lives and works in New York City.
This exhibition will be on view in the first floor gallery and open to the public Tuesday through Saturday through the month of June, and Monday through Friday through the month of July.
