Mel Kendrick: Object Negatives

Opening July 1 and on view through August 1, The Drawing Room in East Hampton is pleased to present "Mel Kendrick: Object Negatives", an exhibition juxtaposing recent sculpture and large scale photographs.

Mel Kendrick, who received a BA from Trinity College and an MFA from Hunter College, achieved notoriety as a sculptor shortly after moving to New York in the early 1970s. During this period when Minimalism was a dominant sensibility in the art world, Kendrick adopted a sculpting technique that emphasized a self-referential and direct use of the natural materials that inspired him. His disciplined process which entailed scoring, cutting and extracting segments from the interiors of rough-hewn blocks of wood and reconfiguring the internal elements in combination with the hollowed structures left behind, has remained central to Kendrick’s practice for the past three decades.

In this exhibition a suite of charcoal gray and chalk white plaster sculptures constitute the most recent evolution of Kendrick’s longtime exploration of the relationship of process to form and emphasis on the physicality of his raw materials. Tackling a new medium to explore the refreshed merging of positive shapes and their negative counterparts, Kendrick continues to make visible the traces of his working method, though the bold, striped surfaces offer both artist and viewer exciting new challenges. These twelve-inch tall sculptures cut from fabricated plaster blocks, rest at eye level on dark steel bases. This pedestal scale series echoes the monumental sculptures that received critical acclaim last fall when New York’s Madison Square Park Conservancy installed Markers, a series of five 10 foot high cast concrete sculptures on the Park’s Oval Lawn.

See below for full press release and selected works.