Mel Kendrick
Water Drawings

January 16 – March 1, 2014

David Nolan Gallery is excited to present a new body of work by Mel Kendrick. On view from January 16 through March 1, the exhibition will include 20 works on paper.

The art critic, Meghan Dailey, has recently written about these new works:

Kendrick describes and often makes his works on paper in sculptural terms. For the past year, he’s been pursuing what he calls “Water Drawings,” a series of cast-paper drawings comprising two 40-by-60-inch sheets created at Dieu Donné papermaking workshop in New York. A black pigment-coated mold is pressed into a soft mass of wet pulp, and under the force of the press the pigment spreads into the paper and binds with it.

The resulting sheets are weighty-looking reliefs, with deep imprints and overlapping forms that resemble topographical views, like lakes or islands seen from an airplane window. There’s also a kind of transparency to the overlapping forms, a sense of looking through one thing and connecting to another. In the act of looking, “what’s on top becomes the bottom. There’s a constant exchange that gives them an internal logic,” says Kendrick. “When I make sculpture, it’s the same thing.”

Kendrick’s first solo show at Artists Space was in 1974 and since then, he has shown in close to 50 solo shows and numerous group shows. In 1984, his work was included in the “The International Survey of Painting and Sculpture” at the Museum of Modern Art and the following year in the Whitney Biennial. In 2008, he was awarded the Francis J. Greenburger Award and other honors include the Academy Award for Art from the American Academy of Arts.

Kendrick's work can be found in numerous permanent collections including; the Art Institute of Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum, the Dallas Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Storm King Art Center, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Yale University Art Gallery.

Kendrick lives and works in New York City.