Tony Matelli, 693, 2024

painted bronze

35.6 x 33 x 20.3 cm
14 x 13 x 8 in

Born in 1971 in Chicago, Tony Matelli is a New York-based sculptor known for his painstakingly detailed, resemblant sculptures. Concerned with how we define ourselves as human beings, what constitutes meaningful relationships, and the transience of life, Matelli chronicles these ideas through a playful lens whilst pushing the boundaries of his medium. The result is a subversive dialogue that deepens the conversation surrounding the possibilities of sculpture. Incorporating figurative, botanical, and abstract forms, his bronze sculptures rely on unusual juxtapositions such as his weeds series in which plants sprout from the space between gallery walls and floors. Across his oeuvre, and particularly in his mirror paintings, Matelli discards traditional genre categories in favor of experiential concerns. His work has been extensively exhibited in notable institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Uppsala Museum, Sweden, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, The Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA, Kunsthalle, Vienna, and Bergen Kunstmuseum, Norway. His sculpture, Sleepwalker, is one his most iconic works and has been prominently featured at The High Line in New York and the campus of Wellesley College in Massachusetts.

Literature

Weeds are markers along the paths of culture—of cultivation and its failure
Weeds are markers along the paths of culture—of cultivation and its failure—and their sculptural representation carries social and political charge, however ambiguous. Transformed by concept, process, multiplication and representation, Matelli’s weeds are vessels of indeterminate meaning open to a variety of simultaneous interpretations…. They seem to be one thing, yet mean something else altogether. Matelli’s weeds are object-metaphors, stand-ins for stray, elusive truths.

Lisa Fischman
Director of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from Tony Matelli: Abandon, published by University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art and Culture, 1999
____

I wanted them to be experienced, first, as simple weeds.
I wanted them to be experienced, first, as simple weeds. I didn’t want them to be experienced as a sculpture—I hoped there would be very little art mediation, and that’s true for a lot of my work. The Weeds really work this way; I don’t think people initially engage with them as sculpture, I think people initially engage with them as real weeds, which allows them to function in the mind of the viewer as real interlopers, strange and out of place.

Tony Matelli
Interview with Marie Nipper, Chief Curator at ARoS from A Human Echo, published by ARoS
____

What belongs here and not there?
I’m not interested in critique—I never saw the Weeds that way. I intended it to be about how things are valued and how we assign value in culture. What is a weed and what’s a cultivated plant? What is acceptable and unacceptable behavior? What belongs here and not there? For me, it was more about situational or contextual correctness, and other things, too, like feeling out of place, or persistence. These things all have a deep personal resonance for me. This work presents a spirit embracing rebellious thought—I see it as motivational in that sense—but there is also an aspect of doom in the work. Depending on what the viewer brings to it, it can be both things.

Tony Matelli
interview with Howie Chen, Independent Curator and Professor at NYU Steinhardt from Glass of Water, published by Walter Koenig Books
____

Vessels of indeterminacy
Casting individual specimens in sets of multiples and installing them directly in the gallery floor, Matelli transformed weeds—through concept, process, multiplication and re-presentation—into vessels of indeterminacy. Seeming to be one thing, yet meaning something else altogether, they became wayward object-metaphors, regaining the "sensuous force" Nietzsche prized as they were revealed to be illusions. Matelli’s installation—“an art installation that does not at all resemble art”—turned a space of cultural cultivation into a breeding ground for uncertain meaning, and his weeds suggested the many truths that elude us just as we think we've got them yanked tight. It is this sort of astute unpredictability, this biting conglomeration of wily humor and cultural politics, that is Matelli's distinction.

Lisa Fischman
Director of the Davis Museum at Wellesley College from Tony Matelli: Abandon, published by University at Buffalo Art Gallery Research Center in Art and Culture, 1999
____

The weed is a triumph and a failure at the same time. They represent both life and decay. Weeds persevere; you can’t kill them. They are fugitive.

Tony Matelli United States, b. 1971

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Tony Matelli United States, b. 1971

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