In the works of New York City-based sculptor Robert Lazzarini, objects of violence are torqued, twisted, and tangled, resulting in "a dissociative viewing experience that is not unlike the effects of psychotropic drugs."
Reconfiguring his subjects through mathematical distortions and rendering them in the actual materials in which they first existed, Lazzarini recreates knives, brass knuckles, and guns in a shockingly realistic yet distorted manner. Though they are rendered in the scale of the original sources, these objects are warped and bent into surrealistic, or, rather, hyperrealistic objects that screw with viewers' visual perception.
Lazzarini's works have been included in many important institutions around the world including the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Taipei Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Kunstalle in Bern to name just a few. He is represented in Los Angeles by Honor Fraser Gallery.
Lazzarini's work is currently the subject of "Focus," a solo exhibition at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth in Texas. In addition to many of his best known works from the past ten years, the highlight of this show presents a twisted bank robbery; a distorted and busted open safe, it's door blown-off its hinges, lies on the floor while a torqued shot gun sticks out of the wall nearby. "The mobster mythology of American violence," as Lazzarini calls it, comes alive in this new piece and the exhibition in general.
There is something about a New Yorker bringing psychedelic home-made guns into a museum in Texas that just makes sense.
Focus: Robert Lazzarini
Through April 5, 2011
Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth
Fort Worth, Texas
www.themodern.org
By Randy Gladman for The Ministry of Artistic Affairs.
