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“I think it’s my job to try to push sculpture forward, to keep it moving, keep it alive,” Anthony Caro told The Observer of London in 1999. “And you don’t keep it alive just by doing what you can do; you keep it alive by trying to do things which are difficult.”

 

Via Librado Romero/The New York Times

Robert Lazarinini makes visually skewed tour de force sculpture that as drawings on paper (with a computer) are quite easy to do. Making them at 1:1 in the actual materials is a monumental accomplishment. It took him 2 years to make his breakthrough masterpiece Violin.  His last Exhibition at Marlborough looks incredible.

After toying with a process of altering form in a more handmade fashion — “free-form, biomorphic distortions and manipulating molds” — Lazzarini turned to the computer as a means to subject objects to strictly mathematically determined alterations. He began with violin, which occupied him from 1995 to 1997 (a period that also included employment in Jeff Koons’s studio, with mold-making and finishing among his responsibilities). Lazzarini’s violin is based on a 1693 Stradivarius instrument in the Met’s collection. “That was the first object in which I eliminated material translation,” he says of the straightforwardly titled work, which is made of flame maple wood, ebony, and bone, all materials found in the actual instrument. “It was a 1:1 scale, a compound mathematical distortion, and there was a figure/ground relationship,” Lazzarini sums up. “It was the fulfillment of a lot of formal and conceptual concerns in this one sculpture.”

via In the Studio With Robert Lazzarini, Master of Sculptural Illusions | BLOUIN ARTINFO.