Gagosian Gallery will present Our Friend Fluid Metal, Nancy Rubins’ first major exhibition of sculpture in New York since 2006. Nancy Rubins is known for exploring the aesthetic possibilities of found objects, reappropriating them in her monumental sculptures. Her explosive sculptures mimic organic processes, in which forms resemble rapidly mutating and multiplying growths, bursting from tensile constraints, their dynamism enhanced by scale and precarious balance. Rubins recasts humble materials as the residue of a baroque fantasy, sliced through with a strong dose of surrealist disbelief.
The title of the exhibition alludes to the currency and mutability of aluminium recycling through evolving social, economic and historical contexts. The playful critters which make up the new sculptures are made with aluminium from military planes. The exhibition consists of four large, tangled masses of form and colour, each clustered in webs of compression and tension. The largest looms overhead, defying its own weight through a system of compound steel trusses and tension cables. The nonsense terms that form their titles–Chunkus Majoris, Paquito, and Spiral Ragusso–point to and make light of scientific taxonomy.
Nancy Rubins, Spiral Ragusso (foreground) (2013)
Aluminium, stainless steel
Nancy Rubins, Spiral Ragusso (2013)
Aluminium, stainless steel
Nancy Rubins, Our Friend Fluid Metal (2014)
Aluminium, stainless steel
by Louise Lui
Our Friend Fluid Metal will run from July 17 until September 13, 2014 at Gagosian Gallery New York, 522 West 21st Street.