Robert Lazzarini’s artwork springs from a desire to understand the perceivable limits of the material world. Conceptually and formally rigorous, he pushes ordinary objects to their limits by mining the twined threads of distortion and material veracity…Lazzarini negotiates a place between two and three dimensions that challenges his viewers’ understanding of the physical world and their visual perception.
– Katie Sonnenborn
Honor Fraser is pleased to present guns, knives, brass knuckles, an installation and exhibition of sculpture by New York based artist Robert Lazzarini. This marks Lazzarini’s first exhibition with the gallery as well as the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles. Show opens on Friday April 9 and Saturday April 10, 2010, 6 – 8pm.
All of Robert Lazzarini’s sculptures of the past decade begin with what the artist calls a ‘normative object’. The works in the current exhibition start with .38 Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolver, a set of common kitchen knives (chefs, paring, pruning, cleaver, etc.) and a unembellished pair of brass knuckles. These objects are then subjected to mathematical distortions and fabricated out of the materials that are original to the objects themselves: blued carbon steel and walnut for guns, stainless steel, wood and plastic for knives; and yellow brass for brass knuckles. The combination of these distortions with the lack of any conventionally artistic ‘material translation’ (e.g. a car out of cardboard; flesh out of marble) renders these objects familiar yet strange and difficult, quite literally, to grasp.
In canting the gallery’s walls, Lazzarini extends the dislocation exercised on his objects to the space of their display. This altered environment not only further subjects one’s perceptions to a kind of visual slippage, but also connects Lazzarini to a lineage of artists, from Richard Serra to Alberto Giacometti, distinctly concerned with processes of perception and visual abstraction.
Robert Lazzarini lives and works in New York. He received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Lazzarini has shown both nationally and internationally with solo exhibitions at Deitch, New York, the Aldrich Museum, Ridgefield, CT and group exhibitions at Yautepec, Mexico City, Haunch of Venison, New York, Tsinghua University Museum, Beijing, and FLAG Art Foundation, New York. His work is part of the public collections of The Carnegie Museum of Art, The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
