Nasher Sculpture Center Presents Sightings: Nathan Mabry

To initiate a new year of its Sightings series of installations and interventions, the Nasher Sculpture Center presents an exhibition in the Garden featuring the works of LA-based artist Nathan Mabry from April 12 through July 7, 2013.

Inspired by sources ranging from archaeology and ethnology to Dada and Surrealism, Mabry, in his own words, “crashes” different aesthetics together, resulting in sculptures that are at turns poignant, humorous, critical, and admiring. 

“Nathan Mabry’s deft collisions of strikingly disparate sources can be read as meditations on the complex lineage of modernism,” notes Nasher Director Jeremy Strick. “His Sightings exhibition draws out surprising threads and links within the Nasher Collection and the design of our outdoor galleries.”           

For Sightings, Mabry will create a new sculpture for the outdoor terrace based on an ancient terracotta Jalisco figure in the Nasher Collection.  This work continues the artist’s investigation of the contingency of cultural meaning and accepted hierarchies in sculptures that juxtapose ancient ethnographic objects and Minimalist geometric forms.  Mabry’s Sightings exhibition will also feature the domestic premier of Process Art (B-E-A-G-G-R-E-S-S-I-V-E) – never before shown in the United States – outside on the steps of the terraced garden.  In this group of six bronze figures, Auguste Rodin’s late-nineteenth century masterpiece, The Burghers of Calais, collides with the expressive heads of mascots from contemporary American sports culture.  Mabry’s work joins a lineage of sculptures that reconsider and pay homage to Rodin’s monument, including George Segal’s Rush Hour (1983) in the Nasher Collection, which will be on view nearby.

Born in Colorado in 1978, Mabry received his BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles. His work is included in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, La Jolla.