Mark di Suvero

NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is happy to announce an exhibition of sculpture and drawings by Mark di Suvero. The exhibition will comprise a recent large-scale steel construction, a smaller, painted metal sculpture and a group of nine drawings from an ensemble of 80 made for Renzo Piano and the Nasher Sculpture Center, Dallas.

The recent large-scale sculpture, titled Chonk On (2000), is assembled from 7 distinct sections and weighs approximately 9 tons (18,000 lbs). It was fabricated at Spacetime in Queens from found elements (the rectangular truss is from a New Jersey highway construction site) and plates that are cut and bent at the studio. The structure can be seen as a colossal abstract drawing materialized in space. Composed of arched steel beams and centrally contorted components, it carries the viewer in and around its heaving spaces.

In the front gallery is Prime Number (1984), a powerful painted metal construction and one of the first sculptures di Suvero made after moving to Spacetime in Long Island City. Of the drawings, di Suvero has said: “I drew ideas out of feelings and pure emotions in telling the ink-wash drawn line’s outflow a kind of natural joy of invention.” With their abrupt extensions and complex nodal articulations, the drawings relate to the sculptures on view as explorations and inventions within space.

Mark di Suvero was born in Shanghai in 1933, to Italian parents. In 1941, his family immigrated to the U.S. and settled in San Francisco. Di Suvero moved to New York in 1957, where he participated in his first group exhibition at the March Gallery, showing plaster and wood constructions. As one of the founders of the Park Place Gallery in 1962 di Suvero exhibited some of his earliest wood and steel sculptures through 1967. Major exhibitions of di Suvero’s work have been held nationally and internationally, in museums or city-wide exhibitions such as: Le Jardin des Tuileries, France and the Whitney Museum of American Art both in 1975; Stuttgart, Germany, 1988; the City of Valence, France, 1990; the City of Nice, France, 1991; Chalon-sur-Saone, France, 1992; and the Venice Biennale, 1995. In addition, di Suvero was the subject of two major one-person exhibitions at Storm King Art Center, New York, in 1985 and 1995 and the city-wide exhibition Mark di Suvero in Paris, France, 1997. Other large-scale sculptures can be seen at the Storm King Art Center as well as St. John’s Rotary in New York City. Mark di Suvero lives and works in New York, California, and France.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or
info@paulacoopergallery.com