Anthony Pearson
Untitled (Flare Arrangement), 2011
bronze sculpture with cobalt patina, base, pedestal, c-print in artist's frame
101 x 40 x 13 inches
(256.5 x 101.6 x 33 cm)
unique

3143 S. La Cienega Blvd, Unit A
Los Angeles, CA. 90016
T 310.558.3030
F 310.558.3060
www.davidkordanskygallery.com
info@davidkordanskygallery.com

David Kordansky Gallery at Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012
presenting Anthony Pearson
January 19 - 22, 2012

Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2012 Opening Day takes place Thursday, January 19 for invited guests.

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce its participation in Art Los Angeles Contemporary with a solo presentation by Anthony Pearson. Representing the diversity of forms and materials that constitute his practice, the presentation will include new typologies that will be shown for the first time at the fair.

Beginning with a deep understanding of the parameters associated with photography –– most importantly the interdependence of the positive and the negative –– Pearson's work has evolved over the last five years to encompass an ever-broader array of conceptual strategies and materials. Silver gelatin prints, C-prints, bronze, steel and wood are used both as vessels for mark-making and as contextual framing devices for each other. Furthermore, they are often combined into arrangements in which organizational logic becomes its own kind of composition, and in which the pictorial nature of objects is understood as both a two- and three-dimensional phenomenon.

Among the new works included in this presentation is a wall-based work made from poured plaster and framed in walnut. Until this point, Pearson has utilized plaster exclusively to create the objects that are in turn used to cast bronze sculptures; in other words, the plaster is usually discarded after its role in the casting process is complete. Here, however, the plaster positive enters the practice itself, becoming both a monochromatic white painting and a sculpture in low relief. It is, in essence, a pictorial rendering of plaster as a material, as well as kind of conceptual picture of its relationship to other materials employed in the practice. Furthermore, the walnut frame brings it into correspondence with the frames and pedestals that are part of the artist's trademark arrangements, inscribing this new typology within the parameters of a rigorous, subtly evolving system.

Also on view will be the most recent of the standalone, wall-based bronze sculptures known as Tablets. Pearson has drastically altered the scale of these works so that they take on new architectural weight. The prior Tablets were scaled to correspond with the intimate dimensions of his solarized photographs and the hand-sized slabs of clay used to make their molds. In the new versions, Pearson has joined the slabs together to create a column that alters the phenomenological experience of the wall as a delimited space.

In a gesture that can be read in relation, for instance, to Brancusi's Endless Column, the physical extension of the Tablet typology suggests that the object itself is merely part of an ongoing chain, and that abstraction can be defined by what has not yet been specifically demarcated. Pearson's intuitive sense of monumental form, as well its relation to minimalism throughout recent and ancient culture, allows him to reflect upon the immaterial experience of light, space, and ambient thought. That he does this precisely through an embodied and careful approach to materials themselves is the compelling paradox at the heart of his work.

Anthony Pearson's work has recently been seen in exhibitions including The Anxiety of Photography, Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, CO; Greater L.A., New York; The Shortest Distance Between 2 Points is Often Intolerable, Brand New Gallery, Milan; Anthony Pearson and Jonas Wood, UNTITLED, New York; At Home/Not at Home: Works from the Collection of Martin and Rebecca Eisenberg, Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; Terminus Ante Quem, with Shane Huffman, Barbara Kasten, Anthony Pearson and Erin Shirreff, Shane Campbell Gallery, Chicago; and Ostras Voces Otros Ámbitos: Fuss, Heikes, Lichtenstein, Pearson, Quaytman, Sparks, Gallería Marta Cervera, Madrid. His interview with artist Barbara Kasten appeared in the November-December 2011 issue of Frieze.