Super Mario's Art: Fine Art in the Fast lane: Nathan Mabry "Armature" at Cherry and Martin January 8

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Nathan Mabry "Armature" at Cherry and Martin January 8 - February 12, 2011

Nathan Mabry "Armature"

2712 S. La Cienega Boulevard
Los Angeles, California
90034
Phone 310 559 0100
Fax 310 559 0120
info@cherryandmartin.com

Nathan Mabry’s work transforms the known into the new and the unexpected. In doing so Mabry asserts artistic agency while at the same time engaging with both art history and normative objects as readymades. A Duchampian trajectory is balanced by an art-making urge that springs from other early Modernists such as Brancusi, Lipchitz and Picasso, whose visual avarice led them to a range of “exotic” cultural material in an effort to create their own visual language. While the borrowings of the Early Modernists from Native American, Pre-Columbian and African art are quite direct, our thinking about the complexity of their interactions with their source material usually is not. Working with both threads in mind is interesting to Mabry, who is ultimately focused on the integrity of his own art objects. Mabry's fascination with how objects function in the public mind and his desire to address the totality of culture, both high and low, fuels an urge to make relevant, holistic objects that engage with the inherent complexities of the world in which we live. Whether we experience Mabry's pieces through art history, or other modes of consumption, is a topic that allows for humor and surprise, complexity and contemplation.

Nathan Mabry received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. In the fall of 2010, his work was the subject of a solo exhibition at Praz Delavallade in Paris. In the spring of 2011, a sculpture by Mabry will be featured in the exhibition, “Sympathy for the Devil,” at the Vanhaerents Art Museum in Brussels. His work has recently appeared in exhibitions at the Parrish Art Museum (South Hampton, NY); the Hammer Museum (Los Angeles, CA); the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (La Jolla, CA); the Las Vegas Art Museum (Las Vegas, NV); 176 / Zabludowicz Collection (London, UK) and The Rubell Family Collection, (Miami, FL).