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Robert Lazzarini (born September 22, 1965 in Denville, New Jersey ) is an American artist who lives in Manhattan and works in Brooklyn, New York. He has been exhibited both nationally and internationally since 1995 and is included in major collections such as Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ;  The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH;  Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA;  and Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN.

Primarily a sculptor, Robert Lazzarini is best known for his compound distortions based on common objects which shift visual space into haptic space. something else about physical space. Negating the idea of sculpture specific materiality, the sculptures are recreated in the same material as the original objects.

Altered physical and spatial

the phenomelogy of viewing, which relate his work to the work of the Minimalists. “As in Minimalist art, the experience of Lazzarini’s sculptures depends as much on the expanded situation of an object in space as on the object itself.JM”

delivers a visual resistance

distortion

“the experience of Lazzarini’s work does not end with a rupture in visual perception. Indeed the very distortions that resist and undermine our ability to see trigger a shift from the spectorial gaze to corporeal encounter.JM” subjecting objects to compound mathematical distortions, Lazzarini asserts the relationship between the viewer’s memory of the original object and what the object has become. Lacking a single vantage point, the sculptures The planar distortions are comprised of skews, scale shifts, as well as accelerated and de-accelerated perspectives. The sine wave distortions are compound projections of intersecting sine waves.

themes

perception

Often focusing on issues of temporality, Lazzarini’s subjects; Isolation, fear, death tend towards the philosophic. His group of works "studio objects", 2000 create a kind of short-hand representation of the artist's studio suggesting simultaneaously artistic introspection and madness JR.

matter of fact and tactile quality of his work is at odds with the elusivity of form

variation and repetition is a formal theme that courses through Lazzarini ‘s work. It recalls “Warhol’s use of repetition and variation” as well as artist's like Donald Judd, John Coplans, Sol Lewitt.

installations

Robert Lazzarini’s installation skulls was first exhibited in the Whitney Museum of American Art 2001 exhibition Bitsreams and brought the artist into wider public visibility. The installation was made up of 4 sculptural variations based on a specific human skull each mounted to a single wall at eye level in an offset square room measuring 15  x 15 feet. Bathed in diffused flourescent lighting, the shadows within the room heightened the works “image aspect” where “the walls of the gallery become a  kind of uninflected visual field against which the form of each object is defined.JM”The experience presented a new type of embodied viewing wherein “You feel the space around you begin to ripple, to bubble, to infold, as if it were becoming unstuck from the fixed coordinates of it’s three-dimensional extension. You soon become disoriented, as this ungluing of space becomes more intense. MH”

Selected Exhibitions

Awards

New York Foundation for the Arts, Artist’s Fellowship, Sculpture 2005 American Academy of Arts and Letters, May 2003 New York Foundation for the Arts, Visual Arts Grant, July 1985 New York Foundation for the Arts, Visual Arts Grant, June 1986

Public Collections

The Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH The Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC The Long Beach Museum of Art, Long Beach, CA The Midwest Museum of American Art, Elkhart, IN Milwaulkee Art Museum, Milwaukee, WI The Mint Museum, Charlotte, NC New School University, New York, NY The Newark Museum, Newark, NJ The Saginaw Art Museum, Saginaw, MI The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, OH The Utah Museum of Fine Arts, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Utah Virginia Museum Of Fine Arts, Richmond, VA Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, NC Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY Davidson College, Davidson, NC

References

Hansen, Mark B.N., New Philosophy for New Media, MIT Press

Ravenal, John, Robert Lazzarini, Virginia Museum of Fine Art

Marsh, Joanna, Looking Beyond Vision: On Phenomenology, Minimalism and the Sculptures of Robert Lazzarini

Links Deitch Projects 

Art Historian Joanna Marsh's essay 

Davidson College 

Sculpture Magazine