Rona Pondick: SELECTED WORK 2008-2023 - 「2008-2023 精選作品」：羅娜．龐迪克

Rona Pondick: SELECTED WORK 2008-2023

Nunu Fine Art Taipei is pleased to present Rona Pondick: Selected Work 2008-2023 in Taipei. The artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery will include six pivotal sculptures. The show opens on May 11 and runs until August 4, 2024.

Since she came to prominence in the late 1980’s, the New York-based artist has worked with fragments that evoke the body—such as shoes, baby bottles, and teeth—reconfigured into new psychologically provocative wholes. In the late 1990s she produced the first of her hybrid sculptures that marry her own body parts with those of animals and trees.

Pondick has been working with a repeatedly altered cast of her own head since 1998. In the works in this exhibition, she has used hand-modeling and 3D technology to make scale changes that underscore the sculptures’ psychological and metaphoric content.

For Pondick hybridity, metamorphosis, and transformation are central.  She draws on a rich body of literary, art-historical, and scientific references, from ancient Egyptian sphinxes to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, to contemporary cloning technologies.

“From the beginning my work has been about metamorphosis,” Pondick says. “It brings me back to Kafka and the idea of transformation, something in flux. . . . Things mutating. . . . Each piece was about an evolution. Within each sculpture, the form would start shifting, and, as the form shifted, the meaning changed.”

The painted bronze works Dwarfed White Jack, White Beaver, Pillow Head, and Navel look soft and fragile, like porcelain. In these four works, Pondick’s sculptural head morphs into animal and tree hybrids, or emerges from balloon or belly-like forms.

The two most recent pieces—White White Swirl and Warped White—are in cast acrylic and pigmented resin. The artist uses these materials to contrast transparency with opacity, making some of the forms clearly discernible while others appear to be about to vanish. The encased forms look as if they are under water, embryonic, or drowning, implying a range of conscious and unconscious desires regarding birth and death, rest and growth, stasis and change.

Pondick has said that she wants viewers to experience her work viscerally, in their own bodies. Working toward deeply embodied psychological meanings, she makes pieces that are so highly articulated that they are technical tours de force.

For the last four decades, Pondick has consistently experimented with materials, techniques, processes, and imagery, focusing on relationships between biography and mythology, the psychological and the bodily, the uncanny and the familiar, in ways that suggest the deep emotional complexity of human existence.

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