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Foxy Production is pleased to announce Stephen Lichty’s third solo exhibition at the gallery, where the artist presents five large sculptures, Repose 1, 2, 4, 6, 10, in concrete and crushed granite and ten small sculptures, Form 1-10, in stainless steel. Each work is a configuration of rectangular planes and conical forms, with each of the large sculptures modeled on the design of a smaller sculpture.
The artists’ sculptures suggest buildings, mountains and plains, relationships among people, and dynamic currents. In places, the gravel moves through holes in the concrete like a breached dam or volcano wall. From different vantage points, the works appear open and expansive, obscured and mysterious, or closed and confined.
The large sculptures comprise flat concrete surfaces inscribed with flows and marks that reflect the pouring process, together with shiny granite pebbles fashioned in circular piles. While monochrome, each work possesses a broad scope of optical diversity.
The smaller, reflective metal sculptures sit together on a shelf, underlining the common vocabulary of forms the artist has used to devise his compositions. Like the programmatic design found in modernist “system built’ architecture, the works’ permutations and combinations are derived from a discrete number of key components.
Lichty’s sculptures’ use of a set of geometric shapes can be traced to the principles of Classical and Renaissance architecture onward. While not picturing the body directly, his works are exercises in the relations between bodies and forms. Like the way an architect plans a building, the potential viewer is integral to the execution and understanding of the work.
His sculptures also recall the use of abstract forms throughout art history: from the earliest geometric abstractions to the Minimalist forms of Donald Judd or Robert Smithson. They activate this history with allusive and immaterial resonances by intimating how people negotiate built and natural forms: experiences that may range from the expansive to the oppressive.
Stephen Lichty works in both sculpture and performance. His sculptures and assemblages amplify a Minimalist aesthetic, his interest lying in the allusive qualities of materials, forms, and placements. His work allows for symbolic, ritualistic, or personal interpretations of his transformations of materials and configurations of objects.
Stephen Lichty (Kansas City, MO, 1983) lives and works in San Francisco, CA. He holds a BSc from the Department of Culture and Communications at New York University.
Exhibitions include: “Stephen Lichty,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (solo)(2021); “Stephen Lichty,” Veda, Florence, Italy (solo)(2020); “Stephen Lichty,” Adams and Ollman, Portland, OR (solo); “Condo New York,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (both 2019); “Be kind to the night,” The Garage, The David Ireland House, San Francisco, CA (2018); “Intuition,” Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, Italy (2017); “Stephen Lichty,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (solo); “A Momentary Lapse of Reason,” Public Access, Chicago, IL; “I am sitting in a room,” Jack Chiles, New York, NY (all 2016); “Stephen Lichty,” CAPITAL, San Francisco, CA (solo); “Museum of Stones,” The Noguchi Museum, Queens, NY (both 2015); “Objects & Thin Air,” Foxy Production, New York, NY (2014); and “Culm,” Night Gallery, Los Angeles, CA (2013).
CREDITS
Photography: Charles Benton.