Barbara Mathes Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of the art of Fausto Melotti. In recent years, the gallery has introduced American audiences to a number of different sides to this complex artist’s career, from his elegant metal sculptures to the chromatic fireworks of his ceramics. The current exhibition—comprised of rarely seen objects drawn from the artist’s estate—features drawings and mixed media works on plaster, revealing yet another dimension to the artist’s oeuvre.
Born in Rovereto, Italy in 1901, Melotti studied both art and music in his early schooling before majoring in engineering in university. When he dedicated himself to becoming an artist in 1928, he drew on all of these experiences to formulate an expansive, harmonious understanding of the arts. Also pivotal to his development were his conversations with his Lucio Fontana, with whom he formed a lifelong friendship while in art school in Milan. His mature work was influenced by the competing avant-gardes of the early 20th century, wedding the Constructivist’s technical rigor with the Surrealists’ fantastical, biomorphic vocabulary. Underlying this eclecticism was an artistic philosophy based on inclusion and harmony, inspired in large measure by his lifelong love of music and poetry. As he once stated, “The matrimony of the arts is their life. Poetry is only such if sentiment is wedded to music, if painting is wedded to the sentiments of poetry and music, lyrical music to poetry, contrapuntal music to a plastic idea. Pure art is a spinster.”
Melotti reinvented his practice in the years following World War II. After discovering that his Milan studio had been destroyed in the aerial bombardments, he rented a kiln, thus initiating a fifteen-year period in which he only produced ceramics and terracotta sculptures. Working with ceramics introduced an organic spontaneity to his practice, as the precise geometries and refined classicism of his earlier work gave way to a more elemental urgency born out of the new postwar reality. When he resumed working in metal sculpture in the sixties, he continued to explore this aspect of his practice in drawings and plaster reliefs. The works in this exhibition find Melotti experimenting with loose washes of color, clotted rivulets of plaster, and an assertive materiality. In comparison to the studied refinement of the metal sculptures, they possess an intimacy and sense of personal poetry, representing a more private side to the artist’s practice.

Lucas Samaras Pastels June 7 – August 9, 2013
 
NEW YORK, NY – Craig F. Starr Gallery is pleased to announce Lucas Samaras Pastels, on view from June 7 to August 9, 2013. The exhibition showcases eighteen drawings from 1974 and 1981, as well as three of Samaras’s densely embellished boxes. A fully illustrated catalogue accompanies the show with an essay by Daniel S. Palmer, doctoral candidate in Art History at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
 
In 1974, Samaras produced more than 100 pastels. Working in concentrated bursts, he made fantastically patterned drawings that bridge the gaps between landscape, still life, and self-portraiture. These works evoke the inner landscape of the artist’s mind.
 
As sites of personal exploration and self-reflection, these striking pastels exploit the medium’s intrinsic qualities in dreamlike scenes, many of which contain ghostly figures embedded in their patterning. The active process of discovering this hidden imagery elicits personal inquiry in the viewer as it reveals the artist’s own unconscious desires. Deciphering these mysterious forms parallels the psychological process we enact when we retrieve an image from memory.
 
With his intricate boxes, Samaras explores similar issues of identity and memory, concealing caches of photographs and mementos within threatening, patterned exteriors. As part of his continual investigation of the self, Samaras’s boxes and pastels broaden the boundaries of self-portraiture.
 
Craig F. Starr Gallery is located at 5 East 73rd Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. Gallery hours are Monday through Saturday, 11:00 am to 5:00 pm in June, Monday through Friday in July & August. For general information please view the gallery’s website at www.starr-art.com.

A selection of Frank Gehry process models will be on display at Leslie Feely Fine Art from April 11 to June 29, 2013. Drawn from significant constructions and concepts of the architect’s prolific career, these organic forms stand as testament to Gehry’s tactile approach, enhancing our perception of this sculptural architect and his work. Projects on view include the California Aerospace Museum and Theater (1984), the Winton Guest House (1987), the Chiat/Day Building (1991), the Barcelona Fish or Peix completed for the 1992 Summer Olympics, and the Beekman Tower/New York by Gehry at 8 Spruce Street (2011).
 
This exhibition presents over 30 diverse process models from 1985-2012, comprising a wide array of materials and approaches that begin to illuminate the subtleties of Gehry’s thought—and working—process. Several renditions of Gehry’s concept for Sonderborg Kunsthalle, for instance, experiment with varying shapes and degrees of fluidity embodied in the structure’s metallic skin. Studies pertaining to an unrealized tower for the Brooklyn Arena utilize materials ranging from basswood, vinyl, and plexiglass to gatorboard and paper. Each successive stage of a given model’s development illustrates the exploratory nature of Gehry’s practice, and the playfulness and originality inherent to his work.
 
Distinguishing his methods from conventional, precision-based modes of development, Frank Gehry’s process is similar to that of artists, sculptors, and scientists. In a 1980 interview he explained, “It’s kind of like throwing things out and then following the ideas, rather than predicting what you’re going to do.” His models can therefore be understood as conceptual drafts, or three-dimensional sketches, integral to project development and design. Moreover, the structures are admirable in themselves as aesthetically beautiful sculpture.
 
This show provides insight into Gehry’s indelible mind, one of the most brilliant—and provocative—of contemporary architecture and design. Photographic reproductions of his studio, the architect at work, and certain realized projects accompany the models on display. This exhibition reveals otherwise concealed aspects of Gehry’s process and practice, while simultaneously inspiring an array of new questions. Ultimately, these architectural studies culminate in a perceptive study of the architect himself.
 
This is Frank Gehry’s second exhibition at Leslie Feely Fine Art, which also held his first ever gallery show in 2007 and featured his models at Art Basel Miami Beach 2011. Solo exhibitions including his process models have been presented by ArtisTree, Taikoo Place, Hong Kong, 2011; the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2008; New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 2001; the Triennale Design Museum, Milan, 1997; and the Walker Center, Minneapolis, which organized a major retrospective of Gehry’s work in 1986.
 
Gehry is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award, Americans for the Arts (2000), the American Institute of Architects Gold Medal (1999), the National Medal of Arts, National Endowment for the Arts (1998), and the Pritzker Architecture Prize (1989). The architect graduated from the University of Southern California in 1954 and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 1956. Frank Gehry lives and works in Santa Monica, California.
 
For more information please visit www.lesliefeely.com, email gallery@lesliefeely.com, or call 212-988-0040.