Presenting a wide range of sculpture from the artist’s decades-long career, Seeing Things in Things explores how Mel Kendrick (b. 1949) exploits the essential properties of his selected medium, whether wood, rubber—and more recently concrete—to create sculpture that inherently lays bare the process by which it was made.
The exhibit will include a selection of table-top sculptural “sketches,” prints, and photographs spanning the adventurous artist’s decades-long career. By leaving visible traces of his trial-and-error process—marks, cuts, paint, oil stains—Kendrick endows his materials with a remarkable sense of immediacy and animation. Moreover, his meditations on the relationships between inside and outside, positive and negative, organic and geometric, nature and culture, sculpture and base, sculpture and sculpture, sculpture and print have led to infinite experimentation.
The works by Kendrick, a Parrish collection artist and longtime resident of the East End of Long Island, NY, will be on view in this comprehensive multi-gallery exhibition that celebrates his unique approach to art-making—one that is fueled by a tireless inquiry into the seemingly limitless possibility of sculpture. A fully illustrated catalogue co-published and distributed by Rizzoli International includes an introductory essay by Nancy Princenthal as well as a series of focused essays by those close to his work.