MEL KENDRICK American, b. 1949

Over the course of five decades, Mel Kendrick has established himself as a preeminent American sculptor, pushing the boundaries of the medium through a rigorous and sustained commitment to discerning a work through the process of making it. Kendrick's thoroughgoing practice has involved the use of cast bronze, concrete, a variety of woods, rubber, resin, and investigations with cast paper. He ultimately addresses philosophical, conceptual, and fundamental questions around sculpture: namely, the relationship between the object as we experience it and the clearly evident means by which it was created. With a material ingenuity and formal inventiveness, Kendrick transforms single blocks of wood into optical puzzles, carving parts from the whole only to reassemble them atop or alongside the excavated base. In this elegant economy of both form and material, nothing is ever wasted, nor is anything added; each block is a question that contains its own answer. The result is something akin to a visual fugue: independent geometric systems are built up within a single composition to create a complex and dazzling harmonic whole, celebrating and complicating their own material and conceptual logic.

Self-contained and self-referential, Kendrick's works bear the evidence of their own making and, crucially, the struggles, errors and mistakes inherent in that process. Graphite marks, paint drips, saw cuts, and fingerprints are all layers of information, markers along a timeline, as if the sculptures were not so much finished pieces as they are stopping points at particular moments within the continuum of creation. And while the wood grain always remains visible, even under a layer of Japan paint, each step in Kendrick's process of assembling, carving and reassembling the wood blocks seems to further remove the material from its ecological origins and push it toward a uniquely physical (rather than theoretical) abstraction.

Mel Kendrick was recently the subject of a major retrospective, Mel Kendrick: Seeing Things in Things, at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY, and the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. Kendrick has also had solo exhibitions at the St. Louis Art Museum, MO; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA; Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Cleveland Center for Contemporary Art, OH; Tampa Museum of Arts, FL; Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH; and The Drawing Room, East Hampton, NY. In 2009, five massive sculptures by Kendrick were displayed in the heart of New York City in Madison Square Park.