NEW YORK – Paula Cooper Gallery is delighted to present an exhibition of recent sculptures by the acclaimed sculptor Mark di Suvero at 465 West 23rd Street. The exhibition will open on October 9 and will remain on view through November 17. This will be the artist’s fourth one-person exhibition at the gallery.

Di Suvero will present a small number of recent sculptures made of steel, titanium, stainless steel or a combination of these metals. The sculptures, some with kinetic elements, range in height from 12 to 35 inches and present, in concentrated form, the issues that have been at the core of di Suvero’s work: the intensely physical handling of metal (twisted, cut or bent), the contrast between mass and weightlessness, and the balance that results from the intersection of vertical and horizontal forms, angular and rounded shapes.

Mark di Suvero is one of America’s preeminent sculptors. Since the 1960s, his works have punctuated landscapes and urban settings in America and abroad, combining, often at a monumental scale, the roughness of industrial materials with the appearance of lightness and a gestural quality reminiscent of three-dimensional drawing. 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. They have been said to meld “the monumental and the intimate, humanizing steel as though it were another form of writing by hand.”[1]

Di Suvero was born in 1933 in Shanghai, China, of Italian parents. His family immigrated to California in 1941 and in 1957 he moved to New York, where he participated in his first group exhibition at the March Gallery, showing plaster and wood constructions. He made his debut with a groundbreaking, widely praised exhibition at the Green Gallery in 1960. Di Suvero later co-founded the Park Place Gallery, an artist-run cooperative where he exhibited his wood and steel sculptures 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; the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, in 1985, 1995–96 and 2005–06; the Venice Biennale, Italy, in 1995; and the city-wide 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.

Di Suvero’s soaring sculpture Joie de Vivre was permanently installed in the newly renovated Zuccotti Park in Lower Manhattan in June 2006. A group of large-scale outdoor works will remain on view through the Spring of 2008 at Millennium Park, Chicago. Mark di Suvero lives and works in New York.

1. Jan Garden Castro, “To Make Meanings Real: A Conversation with Mark di Suvero,” Sculpture, June 2005.

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