Sideways Dinner: Tony Matelli

 

MARUANI MERCIER is delighted to present Tony Matelli: Sideways Dinner, the second solo exhibition of the artist, opening in our Knokke gallery on 8 August 2026.

 

Presenting a series of new sculptures, from an extraordinary life-size self-portrait to his iconic series of Weeds and Arrangements of inverted flowers painstakingly executed in painted bronze, the works in Sideways Dinner reorient one’s perception of the everyday and upend the ordinary angle of visual and social experience.

 

The exhibition takes its title from a new sculptural work that stages an upright arrangement of dinner plates, bottles, and glasses in a humorous take on the iconography of still-life painting. Forming a kind of pictorial plane or relief, the traces of human gathering in Sideways Dinner are at once resolutely familiar and uncanny in their defiance of the laws of physics and time. Drawing on readymade objects, the artist employs a wide range of techniques and materials, such as bronze, silicone and resin, to achieve exacting recreations that separate the trompe l’oeil realism of the surface from the object’s intended function. The works in the exhibition thus hover between the opposites of immediacy and reflection, the permanence and transience of both objects and human relations. 

 

In the series of Arrangements of flowers and Weeds that open the exhibition, one further encounters a sense of a shift in the expected continuum of the real. Palpably lifelike, Arrangement (658) presents a deep purple inverted orchid balancing on a single bamboo stick, as if staging an idea of an object, rather than its physical counterpart. Seemingly unrestrained by gravity, the work nevertheless evinces powerful material quality, achieved through meticulous craftsmanship of painted bronze.

 

The dialectic between matter and thought is particularly evident in Matelli’s striking self-portrait, which presents the figure of the artist in his actual studio clothes. Here, the steadfast realism of the composition is undermined by the twist in the head disjointed from the body, and resting sideways on the shoulder. Echoing classical Greek sculpture in its elegant contrapposto stance, the work fuses deadpan humour with a philosophical enquiry into the dualism of body and mind that has dominated Western culture since Descartes. In doing so, Matelli transforms the familiar into a site of perceptual uncertainty, inviting the viewer to consider the nature of human impermanence and experience.

 

Tony Matelli born 1971 in Chicago, lives and works in Brooklyn. He was the subject of numerous exhibitions internationally and his recent solo institutional surveys include Arrangements at Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Taiwan (2025), I Hope All Is Well… at 500 Capp Street, San Francisco, USA (2018), Hera at The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, USA (2017), New Gravity, The Davis Museum, Wellesley College, Massachusetts (2014), A Human Echo, ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Aarhus, Denmark and Bergen Kunstmuseum, Bergen, Norway (2012-2013). His work can be found in important public collections, notably the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Uppsala Museum, Sweden, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, The Davis Museum, Wellesley, MA, Kunsthalle, Vienna, Bergen Kunstmuseum, Norway, and Yu-Hsiu Museum of Art, Caotun, Taiwan.