Open to the public. Free for Members. $10 for non-members (includes museum admission). Free for Students with ID. Complimentary wine reception with RSVP.
Barry X Ball: Remaking Sculpture is the artist’s first solo US museum exhibition. The exhibition features works from the past three decades delving into and providing context for the two main series of that period, the Portraits and the Masterpieces. The Portraits series transforms precise digital scans of carefully tooled plaster casts of his subjects—friends, artists, and art world figures—into strange, evocative sculptures that seem at once ancient and of the digital age. The Masterpieces series takes as its subject works of art history, from the ancient Greek and Roman Sleeping Hermaphrodite (with 17th century marble mattress by Gian Lorenzo Bernini) in the collection of the Louvre to modernist works by Umberto Boccioni and Medardo Rosso. For these, Ball works with the institutions responsible for each work, making high-resolution 3D scans of the original works, donating the raw scans for documentation and conservation purposes, and using them as points of departure for his reinterpretations of the works. The artist digitally flips the composition, so that his work mirrors the original; accentuates, reduces, eliminates, or adds details; and produces the result in exotic stones whose pitting, veining, and translucency suggest a host of new interpretive possibilities.
Barry X Ball Biography
American artist Barry X Ball (b. 1955, Pasadena, CA) is a devotee of art history, modern Italian design, and California car culture. From his student days at Pomona College in California, he has devoured treatises, catalogues, and magazines on the subjects. Initially associated with the group of Post-Minimalism artists around Joseph Marioni in New York in the 1980s, Ball has produced wall-mounted and free-standing works with fetishized surfaces that update key art historical precedents.
His work has been featured in solo exhibitions at Ca' Rezzonico in conjunction with la Biennale di Venezia; MoMA PS 1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; SITE Santa Fe; Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall; Beijing Today Art Museum; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART); Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon; Villa Panza, Varese; and Castello Sforzesco, Milan. It has also been included in important group exhibitions at museums including the Museum of Arts and Design, New York; Bass Museum of Art, Miami; Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris; Beijing Today Art Museum; Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART); Musée d'art contemporain de Lyon.
His work is in the collections of numerous institutions including the Hammer Museum, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Norton Museum of Art, Le Fonds régional d'art contemporain Bretagne, Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto (MART), and The Panza Collection.
Barry X Ball lives and works in New York.
Sponsors
Presenting Sponsor of 360: Martha and Max Wells.
The 360 videography project is supported by Suzanne and Ansel Aberly: this support enables digital recording of all 360 Speaker Series programs and the creation of an online archive for learners of all ages.