David Nolan Gallery is pleased to inaugurate the Project Room at our new Chelsea location with a work in progress by American sculptor Mel Kendrick. For his third exhibition with the gallery, Kendrick will present Study for a Monument, a 12 x 6 x 6' EPS (expanded polystyrene) sculpture that serves as a first sketch for one of a series of two-color striated stone works that Kendrick intends for installation in an outdoor, public space.

This new project unites many aspects of Kendrick's recent drawings and sculptures, adopting the black and white palette from his 2D paper pulp-casts to the surface and interior of his 3D self-referential objects. Kendrick began experimenting with this kind of sculpture making in the 1980s with his "Core Sample" group, in which he extracted the interior—"pulled out the guts" and rebuilt the sculpture in two parts- the inside and the outside. Study for a Monument goes both ways, its core added to the base and head of the object. Like Brancusi who rejected a clear distinction between the conceptual order of his sculpture and the bases that they sat on, Kendrick engages the idea of a sculpture's growth out of its own form. Outside, these works will reference their immediate surroundings: its monuments, buildings, crosswalks and people.

Kendrick has exhibited widely since his first solo exhibition at Artists' Space in NY in 1974. He was the recipient of the National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1978, 1981, and 1994; the Academy Award for Art in 2002; and most recently the Francis Greenberger Award in 2008. Kendrick's work is in many important public collections, including: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, DC; Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania; Walker Art Center, Minnesota; Storm King, New York and many others.