14 Mar 2013

Rona Pondick Opening at Sonnabend Gallery, NY

Sonnabend Gallery is pleased to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Rona Pondick, her first full-scale exhibition of sculptures and drawings in New York since 2006.

Since her first solo exhibition in 1988, Rona Pondick has worked with fragments that invoke the body, including shoes, baby bottles, and teeth, making wholes that are psychologically provocative and highly suggestive.

In the late 90's Pondick made her first hybrid sculptures marrying her own bodily fragments with animals or trees. This exhibition includes sculptures where Pondick integrates her own head and hands with tree and animal forms using hand modeling, computer technology, and ancient casting techniques. Fluidly integrating the hand modeling with a wide range of cutting edge technologies, Pondick makes highly articulated sculptures.

While all of the sculptures are cast in metal, the artist's treatment of their materiality, form, surfaces, and painting evoke a wide range of sensuous and emotional responses. Pondick's sculptural exploration is always in pursuit of the imagistic, the metaphoric and the psychologically suggestive.

Since 1998 Pondick has been working with the same head, taken from a life cast and altered. This exhibition includes recent drawings in which the artist, working at an intimate scale and in sensuous color, distorts and mutates the image of her own head until the original form, drawn from a life cast, has all but disappeared.