NEW YORK—The Paula Cooper Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculpture and works on paper by the internationally acclaimed sculptor Mark di Suvero. The exhibition includes a new large-scale steel structure and a series of recent drawings.

Time Out for Nicole d’Oresme, a 27-foot tall steel structure, is composed of 5 intersecting I-beams of various sizes and a central curved element. The title refers to the French mathematician, Nicole d’Oresme (1323–1382), who long before Descartes invented coordinate geometry and rejected the theory of a stationary Earth two centuries before Copernicus. Recently made in the artist’s studio in Long Island City, New York, the work has never before been exhibited.

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 found industrial materials with a seeming weightlessness and a gestural quality reminiscent of drawing in space. According to Barbara Rose, “all the sculptures [di Suvero] has made with pieces of industrial steel […] are welded, rivetted or bolted together, connected according to variable but precise arrangements. Mark di Suvero uses the clearness of their geometry and accentuates their linearity. He respects their physical properties, which impose a logic for working and assembly, a dynamic handwriting, calling for mastery of an expression while at the same time emitting a powerful emotionality. He uses their geometrical and material constraints to achieve a free form of writing.”[1]

Over the years, di Suvero’s work has appeared in museums and outdoor public settings around the world. Major exhibitions include: Le Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, both in 1975; the Storm King Art Center, Mountainville, New York, in 1985, 1995 and 2005-06; the Venice Biennale, Italy, in 1995; and the city-wide exhibition Mark di Suvero in Paris, France, 1997.

Concurrently with the upcoming exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery, there will be several opportunities to view di Suvero works this spring. The recently recreated Peace Tower, a project by Mark di Suvero and Rikrit Tiravanija for the 2006 Whitney Biennial, is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art through May 22. In addition, a towering red I-beam structure entitled Joie de Vivre is on permanent display as part of the newly redesigned Liberty Plaza Park in downtown Manhattan. Finally, Part II of “Richard Bellamy – Mark di Suvero,” an exhibition of color and black-and-white photographs of Mark di Suvero sculptures by the art dealer Richard Bellamy, along with a selection of large outdoor and smaller indoor works by di Suvero, will open at Storm King on June 4, 2006, and will remain on view through November 15.

Barbara Rose, “Modernism and Memory,” Mark di Suvero, Valencia: IVAM Centro Julio Gonzalez, 1995 

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