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NATHAN MABRY
With iconoclastic fervor, sculptor Nathan Mabry melds antiquity with the contemporary, producing works in wood, plaster, and clay that satirize both ethnographic art and its modernist derivates. Invoking pre-Columbian artifacts, early modernist sculpture, pop culture, Minimalism, and a plethora of other references, Mabry samples and appropriates in order to question the narratives of progress that frame the history of Western art, and to interrogate the values and meanings of his sources. Mabry reimagines Auguste Rodin’sThe Kiss (1889) so that it becomes a grotesque, provocative effigy, and performs interventions on classical sculptures, giving their iconic and revered forms leering masked faces or fluorescent afro wigs. Mabry studied at UCLA under the satirist Paul McCarthy, a major influence on his work and from whom he has taken many of his visual clues.
Redefining how art is seen and experienced ™