Di Suvero’s steel geometries, with their powerful dynamism and at times calligraphic quality, seem to turn the sheer inflexibility of metal into malleable clay.
– Jan Garden Castro, Sculpture magazine.

NEW YORK—Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of recent sculpture by internationally acclaimed artist Mark di Suvero, from May 9 through June 30, 2008.

The exhibition will present a 21-feet high structure of intersecting I-beams around a central node of curled steel. The central element was cut from a single plate of steel and bent cold with a crane in the artist’s studio in California; the rest of the sculpture was assembled around that central element over a period of three years.

Di Suvero’s distinctive, monumental assemblages of steel and wood are in museum and public collections around the world and have enhanced public spaces in the United States and abroad for decades. He made his debut with a groundbreaking, widely praised exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1960, and later co-founded the Park Place Gallery, an artist-run cooperative where he exhibited through 1967. Di Suvero was given his first retrospective exhibition in 1975 at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Other major exhibitions include: Le Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, also in 1975 (where he was the first living artist to show his work); the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, in 1985, 1995-96 and 2005-06; a citywide exhibition in Venice, Italy, in 1995; and the citywide exhibition Mark di Suvero in Paris, France, 1997. In 1986, he established Socrates Sculpture Park in Long Island City, NY, converting a previous landfill into a vibrant exhibition space for artists and a park for neighborhood residents. He has received both the Lifetime Achievement in Contemporary Sculpture Award from the International Sculpture Center and the Heinz Award for the Arts and Humanities.

Di Suvero’s soaring sculpture Joie de Vivre was permanently installed in the newly renovated Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in June 2006. A show of lithographs will open at the Storm King Art Center in mid-May 2008. A group of four large-scale outdoor works will remain on view through October 12, 2008, at Millennium Park, Chicago.

Finally, Dreambook, a book of more than two hundred images of di Suvero’s most important works, interspersed with short texts by the artist and by other writers who have inspired his art-making practice, will be published by the University of California Press in the fall of 2008.

For more information, please contact the gallery: (212) 255-1105 or info@paulacoopergallery.com